Telling ‘What Is’: Frame Narrative in Zbig Rybczynski’s Tango,Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s When the Day Breaks,and Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales

Tango

I begin with Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Tango, placed by media critic and theorist, Lev Manovich (2005: 70), at the center of the digital/analog divide, that is, a film that is hand-drawn but organized according to self-enclosed layers that characterize digital animation. Rybczynski, a Polish animator and member of an avant-garde group of the time, Warsztat Fromy Filmowej, and in cooperation with ‘Se-Ma-For Studios in Lodz, made Tango early in his career in 1979 in part as a virtuosic display of modular organization and mathematical and geometric design, foreshadowing the significant contributions he would later make to digital film technology in his own work and in the electronic-image software he developed. Tango would go on to win an Oscar Award for Best Animated Short in 1982. But Tango is also a complex frame story, relying on the simultaneity of many narratives layered transparently, one over the other, by means of an intricate framing organization that involves multiple levels of viewer reception.

In Rybczynski’s 8-minute, 10-second film, Tango, 36 small narratives occur and re-occur as layered events within the space of a single room. A boy sneaking into the room to retrieve a ball precipitates the action. Each character has one focused movement and a carefully choreographed entry and exit, captured in a single film loop played over and over. Soon the stage becomes crowded with people coming and going (Figure 1). There are no intersections and no collisions, no acknowledgment of one character within one loop by another character in another loop. Each character walks in step to the film’s musical score, a simple tango tune, but none of the characters touch or see each other.

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Figure 1.

The stage filling up with initial bouncing ball narrative visible. Screenshot from Tango (Zbig Rybcznyski, 1980).

In the end, 36 characters come and go until near the 36th bouncing of the boy’s ball into the room, the activity thins out. Characters exit one after the other without re-entering, and only one remains, an old woman, lying alone on the bed in the foreground. The music stops. The ball bounces in. The old woman deliberately gets out of bed, picks up the ball. She surveys the entire room, now empty, the first and only character to do so, and then, ball in hand, she turns to the door and leaves.

The characters are hand-drawn, photographic cut-outs. A simple set anchors the action. There is a table, a bed in the foreground, a set of shelves to the left, a window on the back wall, and three stage entrances which also serve as exits. The audience is carefully positioned, looking from slightly above into the proscenium arch. The camera is stationary.

Watching Tango is like listening to a Bach fugue. Separate melodic lines, complete in themselves, twine about each other within a carefully unfolding polyphonic whole. The characters are types, not meant to exhibit any individual or distinctive identity. Seen altogether, they illustrate in a generic way the full range of activities occurring in a single domestic space within a lifetime of a family. Yet, as their actions spill toward the front of the stage, the film teases our larger narrative sensibilities. While the thief enters and exits always successful in his theft, it is the fortuitous arrival of the man coming home from work that makes the repeated thefts possible. The babies apparently born near the room are nursed and diapered by the other women who loop in and out of the room. There are also loops with hints of sinister connection: Is a note written at the table, later retrieved by a policeman, who perhaps is a member of the Secret Police, given the way he arrogantly puts his dress coat on in the front of the stage? Is the girl in school attire having sex in the foreground the same girl in school attire diapering and walking a baby at the other end of the bed a moment later? And then there are the loops that beg for fortuitous intersections that never happen: Shouldn’t the man who falls to the floor electrocuted receive some attention? Shouldn’t someone retrieve the boy’s ball almost immediately?

Not only are we tempted to hook one story into another, however briefly, but the shifting patterns of action invite a narrative reading of the piece as an abstract whole. As Rybczynski (1997) himself describes it in Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas’s Cinema and Architecture:

Thirty-six characters from different stages of life – representations of different times – interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16,000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. (p. 183)

A temporal order suggesting the Four Stages of Life does indeed delineate stage space, as Rybczynski notes. The young boy bouncing a ball into the room occupies the back of the stage, the adolescent boy and young men dominate the edges of the stage. Middle-aged men cross the mid-stage area and the old man comes and goes from the table in the center. The electrocuted man intermittently reaches for the light above them all, forming the apex of a rising and falling cone, a startling vertical shape that quickly dissolves into the flow of domestic events repeated around him. Thus are demarcated, youth, adolescence, middle age and old age, birth and death. The strategic placement of orange and white also organizes the visual composition in both abstract and narrative ways, connecting the stages of life with the destiny of the boy entering the window to retrieve his ball.

But the question remains: How are we to understand this film as a whole? We take in multiple mini-narratives enacted by characters within the film. We also sense the abstract narrative design holding things in place. But how are we to understand this story where all things seem so separate and equal? Certainly, we see more than the boy. We see his own luckless, loveless destiny laid out before him in one large, simultaneous, omniscient filmic moment. We see through layers of time arranged one on top of another, and although the film opens ‘in media res’ with the young boy already born, we soon see what might have been the loveless union that led to his birth. In fact, we might be witnessing a series of loveless unions generating the entire group of people coming and going in the house. And of course, the straight and angled trajectories of the characters who never meet or bump into each other, belie the fluid, circular, seductive motion of the film’s title and musical score, the tango. The characters do not notice each other, but we, the audience, notice all, within the confines of walls, that themselves bear silent witness to all that goes on there.

There is one significant exception, however – the old woman who, in fact, closes the narrative sequence that opened the film, the narrative sequence that is the film’s outermost frame. In the last moments of Tango, the old woman retrieves the boy’s ball. She looks slowly around the room as if taking it all in, even though the looping has stopped, and the room is now empty and still (Figure 2). She seems to possess a knowledge of the whole, enigmatic as that might be. Ball in hand, she completes the film’s opening loop, the interrupted narrative that triggered the entire sequence of subsequent narratives. She closes this outer frame. She leaves the room. The film ends.

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Figure 2.

Tango’s outermost story completed. Screenshot from Tango (Zbig Rybczynski, 1980).

While Tango adds and then subtracts separate narrative layers in choreographed loops, When the Day Breaks, a 9-minute, 40-second film made by Canadian animators, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, stacks events on top of each other so we see final events through the lens of the first events and through the lens of the intervening events by means of an A–B–A structure. As with the Hemingway short story and Rybczynski’s Tango, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s animation is primarily ontological in intention: it illuminates ‘what is’ by immersing the main characters, the camera, and the viewer in events that move through time, but which reveal themselves to be spatial, layered, transparent, and out of time. When the Day Breaks is, in other words, another example of James Phelan’s lyrical narrative.

When the Day Breaks

When the Day Breaks, a 1999 animated short, won for its animators, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix at the French Annecy International Animation Festival, the Grand Aprize at Animafest in Zagreb and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film in 2000. The film was made through a laborious process of photocopied video prints, pencil drawing, painting with oil stick, gouache. The effect is delicate, expressive, visually beautiful. The characters are line-drawn, upright, human-like animals that gracefully capture character types within a city. There is the single, exuberant girl, Ruby, the pig, welcoming the new day by peeling potatoes, preparing a soup, singing along with the radio the 1930s song, ‘When the Day Breaks’; there is a dignified, somewhat haughty, well-dressed businessman, a rooster, preparing his morning tea, and later in the film, a young man, a goat, shaving in front of his mirror.

The first section of the film chronicles the morning routines of Ruby in one apartment, a businessman in another. Both run out of breakfast ingredients and go to the store for them. In the doorway of the store, Ruby bumps into the businessman who drops the lemons he has just purchased (Figure 3). This accidental encounter starts a chain reaction of events ultimately leading to the businessman’s death: he is struck by a car at an intersection. The accident happens ‘off-stage’, evidenced only by intimate close-ups of the dented car bumper, of the stricken faces of onlookers, including Ruby, and the small things left behind – a lemon rolling into a storm drain, a pair of broken glasses, the store-bought fish on the pavement, and the sound of a siren.

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Figure 3.

Ruby and the Businessman/Rooster collide. Screenshot from When the Day Breaks (Forbis and Tilby, 1999).

The film now moves into its inner narrative frame, a slow motion montage where we see the life story of the businessman character as it unravels in the ambulance that whisks him away. As a figure struck by a car at an intersection, the character evokes pathos. As a rooster in an animal fable caricaturing a businessman, the character is comedic. The animation deftly tacks between the two. There are drawings of individual bones and muscles and vessels moving right to left, left to right across the screen as if prepared for an anatomy class (Figure 4). There are drawn photo-portraits of the rooster at various stages of his growing up and random drawn alphabet letters, numbers, arithmetic signs and other symbols, indicating what he has seen, who he is, who he understands himself to be, all his component pieces, now in the act of coming apart.

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Figure 4.

The Businessman/Rooster’s bones. Screenshot from When the Day Breaks (Forbis and Tilby, 1999).

There is a transparency to the visual presentation, as if we are looking through layers of acetate made apparent, the images moving in parallel planes across and behind each other. Each image is simple and separate but in a slow dance with the other images emerging and replacing it, indicating the systems and structures, the layers, that the life of a single person, if only for a short time, has brought together. A slide whistle and guitar play a slow waltz in the background.

The montage has the same sense of timelessness and revelation as the montage in Tango, although it is more lyrically organized. Life is layered not by virtue of its repetitive nature, however, but by virtue of the psychological and social systems that constitute its being, and it is the artifice – the drawn portrait photos, the snapshots, the alphabetic and numerical symbols, the drawings of muscles and bones – that reveal the intricate, layered nature of this life. If Tango fully discloses events as self-evident and self-contained, When the Day Breaks reveals what is normally invisible and hidden, so we understand a character’s history and physical and psychological make-up all at once in one omniscient visual moment. It is hard to know how much of the montage Ruby, the main character, intuits. In part we are seeing through Ruby’s eyes and through the pressures of her own emotions, but it is clear we are also seeing through the narrator’s eyes and through the film’s artifice, both revealing an understanding beyond Ruby’s.

The camera follows two dogs chasing the ambulance carrying the businessman, and then pans slowly across a lovely, subdued animated landscape painting that interrupts the scene. There is a glimpse of horses slowly moving back to the barn at the end of the day, dogs barking lazily in the distance. We might remember for a moment that Ruby is a pig, the businessman a rooster, turned by unlikely circumstances into city dwellers and by an animator’s use of animal fable into a human personification of individual loss and urban indifference to loss. The camera does not let us indulge in nostalgia, however, for it quickly returns to the ambulance dogs and their quick snatching of the businessman’s fish, the abrupt gesture breaking the hypnotic moment of death and restarting the larger narrative.

Ruby rushes home, turns her tea kettle on, pulls down the window shade to shut out the city and slumps into the chair at her kitchen table. There is a long pause and then the whistling of the tea kettle introduces another montage anatomy lesson, another inner narrative tucked into the story, this time not pertaining to the business man’s component parts but to the component parts of the city itself. The camera travels up the kettle’s electrical cord through Ruby’s kitchen walls into the electric wires and circuits that, in an abstract system of swirling and vibrant energy, connect her apartment to other apartments in the city. As if overlaying the earlier images of the businessman’s life portrayed as stills, the images of the city’s structures consist of animated abstract lines indicating telephone wires, firing circuits, a zig-zagging invisible energy made visible, traveling in high speeds along a high-wired trajectory in and out of a three-dimensional near distance (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

The city’s interior: electricity. Screenshot from When the Day Breaks (Forbis and Tilby, 1999).

The electrical path extends along power lines out of the city into the countryside, but returns to the city and its trains. Each train window frames the face of a single passenger much as the businessman’s face was framed in drawn photographic portraits earlier in the film. In this self-reflexive moment, we see that the film itself is constructed of single frames, monads, as dependent on their sources in electricity and flickering light as Ruby’s and the businessman’s lives. The film’s three interlocking stories – the story of Ruby’s day, the story of the businessman’s anatomy, the story of the city’s wiring – all appear dependent on systems that, although in vibrant motion, suggest a fixity, a vulnerability to accident and fate, which, with cruel indifference can disperse one small monad within the constant whole.

The camera finishes its self-reflexive jaunt through apartment walls by closing in on another isolated but connected character, a goat, living presumably in an apartment nearby. While Ruby’s electrical outlet heats her tea kettle, his outlet activates his shaver. As he performs his morning ritual, with the same jauntiness as Ruby at the opening of the film, he sings to himself a different 1940s song, this one capturing the homesickness of rural people living in the city: ‘Prairie Moon, where are you. I am missing you too’. There are many parallel but separate lives in the city, but neither can account for death when it happens – there is one last abstract, animated jaunt, this time down the goat’s sink and into the city’s storm drains, revealing in its quick passage the businessman’s forlorn, water-soaked lemon (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The city’s interior: in the sewer. Screenshot from When the Day Breaks (Forbis and Tilby, 1999).

It is apparent that Ruby does not see either the young man nearby nor the systems in the walls that connect her to him, but when we return to her story, we see that Ruby does take heart in the beauty of the tea kettle which, even as it whistles, has an illuminated and comforting inner vitality about it. She is responsive to the quality of light and shape, the beauty of ordinary objects that the camera also reveals to us as lovely drawings. Ruby takes up her morning ritual once more. She finishes making tea. She rolls the window shade back up, and the film ends.

Ruby’s story is simple enough, an animal fable about the shattering of the routines of an ordinary day by an accidental death. In responding to the intimacy of the film, we are caught, however, within Ruby’s distinct point of view, that is, the point of view from which the story is told. We see potatoes in close-up as one who is peeling them sees them. We see tea kettles and lemons and a fish from the perspective of those reaching out to touch them. Yet, the film continually detaches us from this intimate perspective so, as the film progresses, we participate in dual points of view, Ruby’s and the camera’s. If layers of experience constitute the businessman’s life, layers of urban organization constitute Ruby’s life and concurrently such layers of electrical and mechanical energy constitute the animation’s ‘life’. Intimate and heartfelt, as well as mapped and mediated, our view of the film is also layered as we tack between participation, emotional engagement and conceptual detachment across a series of framed narrative segments within the film.

Informing our view at its most fundamental and all encompassing is the movie’s own self-reflexive awareness of itself as medium. It recalls its origins in drawings and sketches, set in motion, in this case formal and informal mimicked portraits, both poignant and funny in the film’s middle sequence where we see a rooster in a hockey outfit, a rooster posed next to his parents, a rooster’s insides coming apart. There is also a flickering presentation throughout the film, particularly apparent when the photo slide show of the rooster/businessman’s life clicks and slows as he dies. When the story resumes, the quick nervous energy of electricity is realized in the rapid abstract motion of lines whirling across space. They are countered by the lovely still life rendering of lemons, toasters, quiet objects close to the ground, dependent as animated drawings, on the electrical grid as well. Finally, the kitchen window that looks out on the factory’s smokestacks in the last sequence of the film recalls the drawn photo stills opening the film. They indicate framed city windows, the framed windows of trains, and the framed images of a filmstrip (Figure 7). The stuff of animation – line drawings and water color washes, attention to light, and the effects of motion – while revealing the indifference of the city, are also marshaled to honor the death of an otherwise unremarked city dweller. Furthermore, the animation itself, although made up of discrete units, is connected not simply by electrical wires, but by a viewer who witnesses them as motion, attributed not only to objects as qualities of light, but also as qualities of energy and inner life. Ruby as main character, as focalizing point of view, as site for the film’s meditation, gathers our own response into hers as she pulls up the window shade, allows the sun to shine in and resumes the rituals of her day.

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Figure 7.

Framed windows suggesting a filmstrip. Screenshot from When the Day Breaks (Forbis and Tilby, 1999).

While the narrative loops in Tango are witnessed only by the silent walls of the room and by the equally silent old woman, the single though quotidian event in When the Day Breaks is witnessed in a limited way by the main character and in a more global way by the camera, which both recognizes and infuses the scene with meaning. In this way, the composition of When the Day Breaks becomes progressively and simultaneously narrative, both a fable and the meditation the fable evokes. The film requires layered ‘reading’ on two fronts – one is temporal, the other spatial. As a spatial experience, When the Day Breaks reveals the inner workings of a domestic environment not by adding and subtracting layers, as in Tango, but by penetrating the walls that enclose the environment – apartment walls, ambulance walls, city and subway walls – in order to reveal the layered infrastructure of the story’s physical and metaphorical world. When the Day Breaks also uses an A–B–A narrative form where the beginning and ending events repeat each other with a disrupting event sandwiched in the middle. The unfolding of the story, itself, is layered. We see the second performance of Ruby’s morning ritual in relation to its first performance but also through the lens of its interruption. Finally, the animators reveal the film’s own self-reflexive entanglement in Ruby’s world, dependent on the urban systems that constitute that world, detached enough to fear those systems, but empathetic enough to use them to both Ruby’s and our own advantage.

Tale of Tales uses both the spatial and temporal framing of Tango and When the Day Breaks, but also relies on character narration to organize and execute the layers of its storytelling. It is apparent, that neither the grandmother in Tango nor Ruby in When the Day Breaks are the narrators of the film. They are not telling the stories, rather they provide a perspective for a camera and an animator who sees more than they do and ultimately through whose ‘eyes’ the story unfolds. Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales, however, is closer to the narration which typifies the lyric form discussed by James Phelan, that is, a story is told by a character within the work.

Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales, a 30-minute film, famous for its visual beauty, its narrative complexity, and for its sophisticated use of the multi-plane camera, garnered for its animator and designers, Yuri Norstein, Francesca Yarbusova, and Alexander Zhukovsky, the USSR State Prize in l979, followed by the Jury Grand Prize at the Lille International Festival of Films in France and later the prestigious Zagreb 28th World Festival of Animated Films Grand Prize in 1980 with additional Zagreb recognition in 2002.

For all of the international attention, however, Tale of Tales is simple, quiet, intimate in tone. The story centers on the life and death of a pre-war Russian apartment house as seen through the eyes of a little wolf and through the eyes of a retrospective narrator partnering the wolf. ⁵ Together, they form a fluid but persistent presence anchoring the many stories and story fragments told throughout the film. As such, they function like the character narrators in the ontological fiction discussed by James Phelan (2005: 46): ‘Writers create versions of themselves as they write, and readers understand both that narrative is a communication from a real person and that they can come to know a version of that person through the narrative.’

A film narrator, of course, does not use words to tell a story as a character narrator in a literary work does (Verstraten, 2009: 13). Yet, narration in an animated film can originate in a distinctive perspective arising out of the conventions of storytelling and out of the artifice of animation itself. Such a dual narrative position identifies Norstein as an implied author, who is recalling a history, but who, as an animator, is also using the plasticity and transparency of the medium to frame and present several narrative genres in simultaneous and progressive ways in order to understand his own place within them.

As an act of historical memory, the film recounts three stories (see Kitson, 2005: 51–83). There is the history of a wooden Russian apartment building, beginning in pre-war times when on hot summer days an outside table was the site for domestic activities. The house story continues through its abandonment during the evacuation of World War II and concludes with its dereliction during and after the war. We finally witness its demolition, its wooden furniture piled up and burned, the opaque fire and ephemeral furniture appearing as a motif throughout the film. Alongside the story of the house is the micro-history of the small town to which the house belongs, featuring events occurring in the town’s dance hall during the war and in the town’s snowy park in winter. Finally, there is the mini-history of the forest, which surrounds house and town. It is a haven for those displaced by war and is later bisected by cars and a highway.

The characters in the three mini-histories are, by and large, quickly sketched animated drawings and hazily presented photo cut-outs. The accuracy of dance-hall lighting, wooden pre-war apartment facades and interiors, furniture rendered from photos and on-site rendering, made vague and indistinct yet palpably present, suggests a documentary precision. Yet the drawings also resemble etchings out of fairy tale books with, at the beginning of the film, a playful mix of human and folkloric animal characters. The old house before the war is established as a mythic as well as an historic space. A little girl jumps rope with a character resembling Picasso’s minotaur. A large, ghostly, but benevolent fish swims in the upper air in the space reserved in many folktales for magical creatures like sorcerers and witches, all hanging conveniently low and reachable in the sky. Through layering of paper and other materials over the images, sophisticated lighting and use of the multi-plane camera, the drawings and cut-outs appear vague and indistinct as if we are in the process of reading a book while falling asleep. We feel ourselves in a middle liminal space, occupied by memories conjured from both a child’s and an adult’s point of view.

While these mini-histories occur sequentially during the first part of the film, images from each intermittently overlay the others, suggesting that the film is not only an act of folk memory and of historical memory, but also organized by an implied author who understands more than a child, and more than a historian and sees events not only sequentially, but simultaneously as well. The flames from the burning furniture, for instance, continue to burst over sections of the scenery particularly during narrative transitions. The roofline of the old town in shadowed miniature, provides a border at the bottom of some of the film sequences, giving intimate narrative events a significance beyond their immediate occurrence. Troop trains suggested by whirling spiral lines of displaced air and dust move diagonally across the screen, creating a near distance, a mysterious but powerful three-dimensional space where the large historical events of war and death happen off stage. Images echo each other and flow into and out of this space: the spiral lines of troop trains, the ghostly movement of soldiers yanked out of the arms of their women, the flapping and folding tablecloth lifted off the table in front of the pre-war house (Figure 8). The triangular telegrams announcing the war dead return from this space as well. All seem to be under the spell of a folkloric whirlwind that arises suddenly, inexplicably, indicating catastrophic change, and which, depicted in animated spiral pencil drawings, also folds images from different times and places on top of each other at the service of a larger, more all-encompassing point of view.

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Figure 8.

Whirlwind tablecloth inaugurating the movements of troop trains, soldiers, and death notices. Screenshot from Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979).

Historical memory, folk memory, and implied author manipulation, however, are ultimately at the service of a fairytale wolf and retrospective narrator. As character narrators, wolf and retrospective narrator establish the film’s outermost narrative frames, even as they participate in the story itself. As character narrators, they hold narrative genres and animated techniques ‘in place’, so they can work against and through each other. The wolf is first and most fundamentally a character out of a lullaby inviting the narrator’s most primitive, liminal, earliest remembered self into the forbidden fairytale woods. At the opening of the film, the camera view and a baby’s view meld together in intimate close-up as hand-drawn figures moving in and out of the white space of the picture plane, suggesting both a fairy-tale presence and an abstract perception. When the baby follows a wolf into the woods, we enter with him by means of a flash screen portal which introduces a metaphoric, historical and ethically charged forest which constitutes the story world of the film’s micro-histories. Although the wolf is not visually present during the re-telling of many of these stories, as a lullaby figure who has led the narrator through a doorway that introduces historical and folkloric events, the wolf is a guide framing their telling much as Aeneas frames the underworld for Dante in The Inferno.

If the wolf provides the film’s folkloric guiding light, the retrospective narrator provides its aesthetic and self-reflexive core. While the first part of the film reveals the history of Russia during the war as experienced by ordinary people far from the front, the second part of the film retells these same stories but within a new ethical and self-reflexive narrative frame. Both wolf and retrospective narrator become more actualized characters and the film examines what it means to make a ‘tale of tales’, using the material it has already unearthed. If the movie has invited folkloric and historical readings, it now takes on the guise of moral allegory and post-modern story as well. The shift is indicated by a moral tale which bisects the film in the middle. The tale is followed by another flash screen which echoes the opening flash screen but with important differences.

The moral tale is separated as a set piece from the rest of the film by virtue of its carefully painted surface, the presence of color in all aspects of the image including skin tone, fabric, landscape detail, and the frontal positioning of the characters in a straight row in the foreground of the picture plane. The moral tale contrasts the generous offering of food to birds by a little boy to his subsequent forced military transformation at the hands of a drunk man and his fur-draped female companion.

The flash screen portal that follows the tale does not indicate the liminal following of a wolf into the woods as in the opening, but now contains the figure of the wolf with a very long shadow passing through the opening, a figure to be examined in his own right. As a more fully realized character, the wolf becomes not simply an amoral lullaby character but a stand-in for a more psychologically realized character with ethical obligations within a human history (Figure 9). In similar ways, the retrospective narrator, represented at the outset of the film by an unproductive and frustrated poet at the table in front of the pre-war house is also carried into the film’s self-reflexive circles. He is actually the owner of the manuscript, the subject of the wolf’s second theft. If, at the opening, the frustrated poet has ignored any creature’s urging him to write, in this second iteration of the story, he consciously allows the wolf to steal his manuscript. In an animated sleight-of-hand, the manuscript becomes a baby when the wolf carries it into the woods. The wolf wants to abandon the baby, but in a telling moment which turns the wolf from amoral fairytale character into ethically obligated being, he decides not to leave the baby under a bush, but picks it up and runs off with it, awkwardly and comically trying to calm it. In a joke on the film’s opening sequence, he successfully quiets the baby by singing the very lullaby that brought him into being as a folkloric character in the first place.

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Figure 9.

House, wolf, and the second flashscreen joining folktale, historical detail, personal narrative, and self-reflexive story. Screenshot from Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979).

As a character with a long shadow entering through the film’s second portal, the wolf undergoes another self-reflexive twist. He becomes identified with another long-shadowed character established by negative space, in this instance, not the quick fairy tale change of a flashscreen, but by the more evocative gauze spaces of off-stage history. A young man appears with a rucksack, a vaguely drawn figure with the wolf’s long shadow behind him (Figure 10). The young man trudges diagonally upward toward a re-iteration of the pre-war family, except this time the father has returned from fishing to his rightful place at the head of the table, dishing out soup for each character one at a time. The young man walks around the table and, just as he is about to leave the picture plane and enter into the ethereal area beyond, the father invites him to share their meal. After the meal, they all disappear into the distance. For a brief narrative moment, the old house is fulfilling its life as a place for family, for nurturing and for remembering, and if one were to cautiously extend an allegorical reading, the poet who accepts the machinations of a folklore wolf is also the artist who can leave his homeland with the blessing of the remembered family. He can go on and tell their story.

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Figure 10.

The wolf’s long shadow shared by the self-reflexive narrator. Screenshot from Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979).

But as a self-reflexive lullaby about ‘what is’, to again refer to Phelan’s definition, the film does not release its characters quite so easily. In frame narratives, the final moments are as important as the opening moments. They book-end the piece as a whole, establishing the outermost story into which all the other stories fit. It is telling that during the movie’s final moments, Norstein takes us back into the Russian village, no longer a border at the bottom of the screen, but a twilit road crossing a bridge under which a train roars by. The train’s whistle reminds us of the troop trains and the rolled up tablecloth, both accompanied by a similar whistle. A dim streetlight above the bridge recalls the desolate woman and homeless man shadowed by the same pooled light earlier in the film. We are once again at the crossroads, at the foot of the road, at the beginning of a journey through a history already formed by war and displacement, but yet to be reshaped by the animation that can again recall it. If a lullaby opened the film with its invitation to probe a dark history, its last stanza identifies the starting point for that probe – the moment when a village was bisected by a train carrying troops off to war. Having witnessed the film and participated in its events, the implied author as character is equipped to tell the story, the animator is able to find the multiple voices through which this story is told without excising pain or loss. As any lullaby sung night after night, the film begs to return once again to its opening, to its both dark and restorative beginning.

Conclusion

Tango, When the Day Breaks, and Tale of Tales demonstrate animation’s affinity for frame narrative constructions that are lyric and ontological. Stories embedded one into another can contain all the forward motion and continual change characteristic of the medium while paradoxically holding stories ‘still’, to be taken in and understood as a multi-layered whole. Such animations – well described by James Phelan’s (2005) definition of the ‘lyric narrative’ – while inviting a viewer into the energy of sequential presentation, also use the predicament that instigates the story as a focus of meditation. As we have seen, they make complex but fruitful demands on their viewers. In the case of Tango, they rely on our desire to connect one story to another and our capacity to narrativize abstract design. In the case of When the Day Breaks, they teach us to read architecture as narrative and also to read a story backward so we understand the implication of repeated events. In Tale of Tales we learn to track, by way of character narration, the interaction of multiple narrative forms that together create an intricate texture of memory, history, folklore, moral tale, and self-reflexive story.

Most importantly, the viewer is drawn into these stories not simply as intellectual exercises but as deeply emotive experiences – we feel for Ruby ‘when the day breaks’, and for the baby, the wolf, the bereft women in Tale of Tales, and for the characters perpetually ‘trudging’ through their collective day in Tango. The story’s frames ensnare us and detach us. They ‘teach’ us but keep us questioning what is taught with our eyes fully upon the medium itself that both mirrors and obscures. Taken together, they reveal the rich potential for frame stories in animations that make full use of their layered artifice for narrative as well as meditative and ontological purposes.