Visions in Uzbekistan

Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate:

• 1. On the golden age of Uzbek animation.
• 2. Animation newsbits.
• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Winds of change

Animation from Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, doesn’t get a lot of buzz right now. Viewers in the country tend to favor foreign work: anime, American films. Uzbek animators face a lack of money and distribution, and their ranks are thin.

But things were different, once. During the ‘80s, the studio Uzbekfilm did animation that wasn’t quite like anyone else’s. And it marked its home city, Tashkent, as a hotspot of Soviet animated films.

Director Sergei Alibekov worked in that scene. He said a few years ago:

It was the rise of Uzbek animation. There was absolute creative freedom with full funding. Such masters as Nazim Tulyakhodjaev, Mavzur Makhmudov and Svetlana Muratkhodzhayeva worked, as did many young people; everyone wanted to create. Uzbek animation began to be highly valued in the USSR, receiving prizes at festivals. And then in one moment everything collapsed.

This boom in Tashkent was announced by a certain film. Alibekov was its art director — his first job in animation, after years as a painter. Its title is There Will Come Soft Rains (1984), and it began a dark, mysterious, atmospheric turn for Uzbek animation. Even now, it’s famous.

If you know animation from the USSR, there’s a good chance you know There Will Come Soft Rains. It takes place in California during 2026, after the bombs. We enter a house run by robots, which go about their daily routines unaware that their human owners were burned to ashes in their beds.

It’s a Cold War film, but also more than that. A writer for Cinema Art called it a critique of “soulless machine civilization” as a whole.

We watch as a bird, a living thing, flies through one of the house’s broken windows. The head robot tries to kill it, only to destroy itself and its domain. That Cinema Art writer saw this robot as an “embodiment” of the same “aggressive force that created the preconditions for nuclear catastrophe.” The bird outlives it, and ends the film by running again and again into a digital screen that depicts nature: a cry for what once was.

The film’s director, Nazim Tulyakhodjaev, has spoken about those themes himself. There Will Come Soft Rains is a warning about humans’ desire to dominate and mechanize the world, he’s said, and about their loss of humanity in the process.

Soviet animation was rarely so harsh and critical, or so pessimistic about the future. But Soft Rains was something new. Brezhnev had died in 1982; a political thaw was underway.

In 1983, two visitors from Moscow had come to Tashkent: director Fyodor Khitruk and a top person from Goskino, the Soviet film board. Tulyakhodjaev took the chance to argue his case. “[N]ew times have arrived, but you still won’t let us do anything new,” he said. Put on the spot to name a project he wanted to make, he answered: a Ray Bradbury film.

And so Tulyakhodjaev based Soft Rains on a Bradbury piece from the ‘50s. As he said:

I liked Bradbury since my university days, but it was unrealistic to stage him in the Brezhnev era. While in Russia they occasionally made films and plays based on “capitalist” authors, our Uzbekfilm could not count on this. Chiefly, we shot purely national pictures on purely national fairytale themes. But then came the “blessed ‘80s” and the winds of change.

Two keys to Soft Rains are the eerie soundtrack of Felix Yanov-Yanovsky and the equally eerie art of Sergei Alibekov. Most of the film is done with stop-motion cutouts, but without the flatness you’d expect: the staging is dynamic, more live-action in feel. For Tulyakhodjaev, the whole thing was an “experiment.”

Luckily, this experiment was a success. Animation from Tashkent rarely got awards outside the USSR, but Soft Rains picked up prizes in East Germany and Spain. It even traveled to America in 1987, where it screened to good response alongside Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales.

Among the few to complain about it was Ray Bradbury himself — who hadn’t seen it, but also hadn’t been paid for the rights to his story. “That’s just like the Russians. They talk about fair play, but they steal everything,” he fumed in ‘86.

The ‘80s turned into “the heyday” of Uzbek animation, according to one historian. These were the years of experimentation, and of films about “more philosophical and psychological matters.” Uzbekfilm kept doing projects in the Soft Rains vein: enigmatic animation for adults, with visual styles outside the norm.

The Garden of Chrysanthemum (1986) is one example. It’s another cutout film, shot on a multiplane camera kit, whose aims are poetic. At the start, a man kills and skins a fox, then stretches its pelt across a bamboo rack. When a wind carries the pelt away like a kite, the man gives chase.

The pelt begins to take on supernatural qualities, appearing and vanishing. It swings from trees; a dark cloud in its shape covers the sky; the fox’s face, massively enlarged, fills a doorway. The man seems to be cursed, somehow, and his romances fail, and he’s left broken.

Director Nikolai Smirnov called upon a familiar duo to make Chrysanthemum: art director Sergei Alibekov and composer Felix Yanov-Yanovsky, whose score here mixes ‘80s synths with haunting choral arrangements. They created a film hard to compare to anything other than Soft Rains and Tale of Tales. It’s a vision — indirect and evocative of strange feelings, with a bit of dream and nightmare in it.

It’s perestroika animation. Alibekov said it well: “absolute creative freedom with full funding.” Chrysanthemum was done in that unusual period after the USSR liberalized, but before it collapsed. A project this esoteric would’ve been forbidden to Uzbekfilm in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Yet, in the ‘80s, Chrysanthemum was highly praised in the annual Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

The studio would do more of these vision-films: The Horse, The Pause. Among its finest is A Thread (1989), a meditation on traditional Uzbek life, and on death.

Sergei Alibekov art directed that one, too. He also co-directed it, working alongside one of the masters he mentioned: Svetlana Muratkhodzhayeva. She was an actor-turned-director (much like the man behind Soft Rains). A Thread was a film she was “especially proud of.”

It’s one of Alibekov’s big films as well. Like he said, it was:

... the technique of painting with oil on glass. I painted for seven months, day after day. And above me hung a camera.

Alibekov used the paint-on-glass technique well, and to different effect than Alexander Petrov. A Thread pushes the dreamlike element of Chrysanthemum and Soft Rains even further, close to the point of surrealism. It’s a series of stark, richly painted images, set once again to the music of Yanov-Yanovsky.

According to one historian:

The film is striking for its depth and national theme; it concerns a man’s recollections, relating to Uzbek customs and lifestyle. Probably for the first time in Uzbek animated art, the directors managed to show life from within. …The film is also rich in details of traditional life: tandyr, beshik (a special cradle for babies), the traditional columns, toomor (amulet), tubeteyka (Uzbek cap), tillaqosh (women’s gilded forehead adornments). Silver earrings appear three times … connecting the hero’s present with his recollections.

The film and its ending are haunting, a word for which it’s easy to reach when talking about these Uzbek films. They aren’t tied to the old tics of Soviet animation: the optimism, the bright colors, the fairytale stories or the technical movement. And yet they were made at a happy time for Uzbekfilm, just before the end.

The Soviet Union was crumbling when A Thread came out, and it soon collapsed. That wasn’t the end-of-the-world scenario portrayed in There Will Come Soft Rains, but was the end of a world. The world behind the Iron Curtain, which had its own history, way of seeing and method of production. All were deeply flawed — not unlike those in America — but it wasn’t a small thing to brush them away.

For Tashkent, that moment in animation came to a close. Many artists kept working as they could — Nazim Tulyakhodjaev has fought for Uzbek animators since the ‘90s, for example. The era of free creativity and state funding, though, has never quite come back. “[M]y best films were made during the Soviet era,” Tulyakhodjaev has argued.

He has few illusions about the USSR. There was hardship under communism, not to mention censorship: he learned filmmaking in part from underground screenings of banned Western work. But he still feels a certain draw to the perestroika days, to the artistry that state money made possible — and to the world that once was.

2. Newsbits

• This month brought lots of major birthdays. Yuri Norstein and Garri Bardin (Russia) are both 85, while Yoichi Kotabe (Japan) and Nedeljko Dragić (living in Germany) turned 90. To celebrate, take a look at Norstein’s rare sugar commercials, Bardin’s subtitled films and Dragić’s Day I Quit Smoking.
• Animators Brian Smee and Isabelle Aspin spoke at length to Cartoon Brew about their work on the Mexican film Roy from Space, and how they tried to be “invisible” in their new animation for it.
• In Britain, two burglars with backgrounds in art theft (Picasso, Monet) were sentenced to prison for stealing from Mark Baker of Peppa Pig fame.
• In Italy, animator Gianluca Maruotti put together an impressive stop-motion video for A Comic Book Saved My Life, a new song by rapper Caparezza.
• It’s no secret that Odilon Redon’s paintings have impacted Japanese animation, and the Redon expert Noriko Yamajo has identified another case: the soot sprites in Spirited Away.
• In America, the Disney museum is set to exhibit 200 pieces by Eyvind Earle, the artist who defined the look of Sleeping Beauty.
• Also in America, Lauren Faust looked back on her experiences with My Little Pony in an interview with AWN. “I was trepidatious about working for a toy company,” she admitted, but she fought to turn her series “into something more than the stereotype.”
• A Chinese student short, Welcome to the Animas, is pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. Its creators told Anim-Babblers about the project and its unlikely inspiration: a fan animation for Team Fortress 2. (Note that the film is embedded, with English subtitles, at the top of that page.)
• Cartoon Forum took place in France, and Animation Magazine has the stats and the big winners from the event.
• Finally: a reflection on video games, animation and visual storytelling techniques.

3. Last word

That’s a wrap for today! As usual, we’re ending off with personal comments from the two of us:

John: This past week, I spent a lot of time following the response to last Sunday’s article on the Disney renaissance movies and 35 mm film. It went more viral on Twitter than any issue we’ve shared there, which led to media coverage from GamesRadar, Badtaste, GeekTyrant, ComingSoon and others. We were pretty floored. It was especially interesting that many folks were already, silently, underwhelmed by modern editions of the films, but were chalking up their memories to rose-colored glasses. Seeing the difference side by side was cathartic for them. I didn’t predict that explosive emotional reaction. If Disney ever does restore these movies from 35 mm sources, I think there’s an audience. Thanks to everyone for reading.

Jules: Last Thursday’s newsletter covered something John and I have discussed quite a bit this year, which is the idea that early video games might have resonated with audiences not in spite of their visual limitations, but because of them. The demands of the hardware forced developers to rely on the abstraction and reuse of visual elements like characters, animation and backdrops. Archetypal roles (merchant, guard, monster) were often assigned appearances that every member of the given type shared. Movement was expressed broadly through simple, distinct animations reused in different scenarios, symbolically representing the given emotion or action. It might not all have been on purpose, but it had a lot in common with the theories that artists like Jiří Trnka and Kihachiro Kawamoto used in their puppet films, which were in turn influenced by the archetypes, masks and symbolic, ritualized movement found in forms like ancient Greek, Noh and live-puppet theater, and commedia dell’arte. The techniques those early games once used out of necessity still speak to people, even in contemporary retro-game projects, and it feels like something could be gained by studying their example!

Until next time!

Many have discussed the problems in the current industry — see here, for example. Pavel Kim (one of Uzbekistan’s most successful animators right now) listed a few last year. Among them: the “absence of a robust infrastructure,” not enough people in the business, no “well-established distribution or licensing market” and no YouTube monetization.

That said, not all is bleak. Kim’s series Tomato Doppi is popular, even abroad. Animation schools are popping up; in May, the government cut a deal with a Japanese studio to train Uzbek animators. Since 2022, an animation event — the “Tashkent International Animation Forum” — has been held each year. Meanwhile, tons of restored classics have popped up on YouTube. Uzbek animation has changed, but there are people fighting to keep it alive.

See this 2018 interview with Alibekov, a major source.

Details about Alibekov’s early career, and entry into animation through the invitation of Tulyakhodjaev, come from here and here.

The writer was Anri Vartanov in Cinema Art (July 1985).

Tulyakhodjaev explained this in a video interview with Tairova a couple of years ago.

See interviews with Darakchi, Sputnik Uzbekistan and Dunyo Boʻylab — all important sources today.

Bradbury’s words were printed by the Los Angeles Times. For the film’s prizes and praise, see Animator.ru and The Plain Dealer (March 27, 1987). As an aside, scholar Makhsura Mirzamukhamedova has said that There Will Come Soft Rains was the first Uzbek animation ever to win an international award, but Tulyakhodjaev has claimed that one of his earlier films won a prize in Portugal first. It’s not clear who’s correct.

This is Shoyista Ganikhanova in Animation: A World History (Vol. 2). Also our source for the long quote about A Thread.

The praise for The Garden of Chrysanthemum appeared in the 1987 edition of the Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, on page 85.

See this article from Darakchi.

Tulyakhodjaev said this in an interview with Spherra UZ. For examples of his battle for Uzbek animation, see Radio Free Europe and Fergana News. His quote about the films he made in the USSR comes from UzAnalytics.

Today’s story is an edited reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on April 3, 2025.