The Old Man and the Sea

The old fisherman Santiago has caught nothing for eighty four days. He goes out alone and a marlin larger than his boat takes his line. The fish pulls him out to sea for days. He does not let go. In the end he beats the fish, and on the way back the sharks come. Aleksandr Petrov directs. The source is Ernest Hemingway's novel. How it was made is the real story. Petrov works in oil paint on glass: every frame is painted on a sheet of glass with the fingertips, photographed, and then worked over again on the same paint for the next frame. No frame is kept; each image is made on top of the one before. More than twenty thousand frames were painted by hand this way, and the work took over two years. It was made for the large screen in the IMAX format, an unusual choice for a short animation. It won the Academy Award for animated short in 2000. It runs about twenty minutes, and in fitting the novel into that time the dialogue is almost entirely removed; the telling is left to the image. Who it is for: anyone interested in animation technique and readers of Hemingway. Who it is not for: it is short, the plot is simple, and it offers little to a viewer who wants narrative depth beyond the visual experience.