Moya lyubov

it is a great travel. across a feeling. across the images of a lost Russia. it is an admirable work. for the details, for the dialogue and for the magnificent art to reflect states out of words. it is a masterpiece and this is not a real surprise from Aleksandr Petrov. the special thing is the emotions after the end of film. as a ball of tenderness and seductive secret and childish - clear feeling. from a long time ago, for me, the films of Petrov are a sort of gifts of the Christmas Eve. but my love is more. maybe because I am East European. or for Slavic origins. it is a form of rehabilitation of a Golden Age using the perfect tools. and the result is more, real more than you expect.

Where the story is only may be interesting for a teenager boy who is in love with women, the scenes take the lead and oh my God, they shine... I wouldn't watch even a minute of it if was a normal movie, but this one is like watching a impressionist painting in action.

You know that you've become an animation buff when the mere mention of Aleksandr Petrov makes your heartbeat quicken in anticipation. Along with fellow genius Yuriy Norshteyn, he has become one of my favourite Russian animators, and such impressive short films as 'Korova (1989)' and 'The Old Man and the Sea (1999)' rank among my favourites. 'My Love (2006),' Petrov's latest film, was his fourth to be nominated for Best Animated Short at the Oscars, and, though it lost to Suzie Templeton's 'Peter & the Wolf (2006),' it certainly is one of the year's finest releases in any medium. Generally well-received by critics, 'My Love' has nonetheless stirred a few incidents of controversy, including comments from Chris Robinson – head of the Ottawa International Animation Festival – who apparently took offence to Petrov's pursuit of realism. Likewise, other leading animators, including Norshteyn himself, remarked that perhaps the film was too focused on technology rather than storytelling.

The plot is based on "A Love Story," a 1927 novel by Ivan Shmelyov, and concerns a 16-year-old boy, Antosha, who is searching for his first true love. As he falls in and out of his romantic fantasies, Antosha must decide between two young woman who have captured his fancy – a pretty, innocent but uneducated parlourmaid named Pasha, and an experienced upper-class lady named Serafima. He is equally smitten with both lovers, but his inability to choose between them will prove tragic. Pasha is genuinely affectionate towards Antosha, but class restrictions prevent them from coming together without a certain hesitation; on the other hand, Antosha worships Serafima as a "goddess," considering her representative of his lover ideal. When experience reveals a fatal blemish in his idealistic illusions, the young boy rejects the older woman, but not before his indecision has cost him the girl that he truly loved.

'My Love' often treads a fine line of comprehensibility – I'm not even certain that my description so far is completely accurate – but it's really the visuals that you should be watching out for. Petrov's style of paint-on-glass animation is instantly recognisable, and has all the beauty of a moving Impressionistic painting, the oils and colours shifting smoothly like the quiet waves of an ocean. Though, in order to achieve a sense of "romantic realism," Petrov has produced about 20% of the film using a kind of rotoscoping, he just as frequently descends into fantastic flights of the imagination. Antosha's inner romantic turmoil is represented through beautiful and sometimes terrifying daydreams – rowboats on a pond, ships amid a lightning storm, bodies burning in the pits of Hell – and Petrov's constantly-shifting style of animation is perfect for evoking the timelessness of our dreams and memories.

"Moya lyubov" or "My Love", paint-on-glass-animated 2006 short film (26 minutes) directed by Aleksandr Petrov is based on "A Love Story" or "Istoriya Lyubovnaya" (1927) by Ivan Shmelyov. It takes place in the 19th century Russia and tells about the first love of the sixteen-year-old boy Anton who is torn apart by his feelings for a pure and gentle girl, the maid-servant for his wealthy family, Pasha and a mysterious enigmatic next door neighbor Serafima. Shemelyv's story was inspired by one of the most captivating love stories ever told, his famous namesake Ivan Turgenev's "Pervaya lyubov" (1860; First Love), a novella that depicts the love of a sixteen-year-old boy Vladimir for his neighbor, 20 years old princess Zinaida, unattainable, devious but alluring and unforgettable. By the words of Petrov, the film "is about waking of first love, naive and childish, both resolute, and silly, with all tortures of a romantic soul. Not that I have gone through such feelings myself, but I deeply felt all of them." At the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, "Moya Lyubov" was called an "exquisite impressionist vision with a very poetic narrative and profound psychology". I believe that Petrov's film was the best of five nominees in the category Short Animated Films and deserved all awards possible. As much as I enjoyed the 2008 Oscar winner, the slow-motion updated to modern Russia version of Sergey Prokofiev's "Peter and Wolf", Petrov's film is simply in league of its own. Work on the film took place in Yaroslavl, Russia over a period of three years painting on glass sheets, using mostly his own fingers, resulted in 18720 paintings. The film's style is similar to that used in Petrov's other films ("Korova", "Rusalka", Oscar winning "Starik i More") and can be characterized as a type of Romantic realism. People and landscapes are painted on glass and animated in a very realistic yet delicate and dream-like fashion. In "Moya lyubov" Petrov includes Anton's inner thoughts while the boy reads Turgenev's "Pervaya Lyubov" and identifies with its narrator, Vladimir, the boy of the same age and the nightmarish scene when the ill boy imagines himself being buried beneath freshly-fallen deep snow on a dark night.

Every frame of the incredibly beautiful work is literally breathtaking. I can't compare him to any working animator. His films bring to mind the paintings of such poetic Russian Artists as Mikhail Nesterov, Vasiliy Polenov, Victor Borisov-Musatov, and even frescoes and icons of Andrei Rublyov that under magic fingers of the master became living and breathing.

Just watched this Russian film that's nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short of 2007. Moya lyubov (My Love) seems to be an oil painting come to life that tells the story of a young man's infatuation with two women: one that's dark-haired who seems so far away from him to have any contact with and one who's blond in pigtails who is very close in proximity and seems to have a very good interest in him. Since I saw this on YouTube as linked from Cartoon Brew in the native country's language with no subtitles, I couldn't completely understand what was going on but many of the painting-like movements presented such a visual dream-like state to the proceedings that I was mesmerized just the same. Very worthy of the Oscar nomination so I wouldn't mind if it won but I saw two others of the nominated that were interesting in their own way so here's to them all.