Hedgehog in the Fog

"Hedgehog in the Fog" (1975) is Yuri Norstein's ten-minute Soviet animated short — free to watch online on iFILM and placed first in a 2003 international critics' poll of the greatest animated films ever made. Short, but not slight.

Hedgehog sets out to visit Bear for their nightly star-counting session. The route is familiar. Then a fog bank rolls in, and everything familiar stops being itself: a white horse dissolves, a dog becomes a sound in the mist, falling leaves feel like questions. Aleksei Batalov narrates, and the tone sits closer to quiet unease than bedtime story.

Norstein animated each scene in physical layers of cells at different depths, so the fog onscreen is an optical effect, not painted. Poet Sergei Kozlov adapted his own story; the same Norstein–Kozlov partnership later produced "Tale of Tales" (1979). Stream "Hedgehog in the Fog" online on iFILM.