A Plasticine Crow

A Plasticine Crow (1981) is a short Soviet animated film you can watch online on iFILM. The debut work of director Alexander Tatarsky, it runs nine minutes, with voices by Leonid Bronevoy and Grigory Gladkov.

The film riffs on Ivan Krylov's fable about a crow and a fox, but Tatarsky doesn't simply illustrate it — the plasticine remakes itself on screen, figures dissolve and reshape, the story keeps shifting into new versions of itself. Characters were built from drawings that children in Kyiv submitted for the project, which gives the film its handmade, restless look. This nine-minute short launched the style Tatarsky would develop fully in Last Year's Snow Was Falling. Watch A Plasticine Crow (1981) online on iFILM.