Skazka Skazok /The Tale of Tales (dir. Yuri Norstein, 1979) [29 minutes, English subtitles]

Animated by Yuri Norstein and drawn by Lyudmila Petrushevskaia, Skazka Skazok remains one of the most beautiful and intriguing animated films ever made.

It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so [...]

Tale of Tales was created by Norstein while employed at the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored animation studio Soyuzmultfilm. Completed in 1979, it delighted Norstein’s colleagues, confounded the censors of Goskino (who immediately banned it, wholly ineffectually), gained awards at several international festivals, and was voted the ‘Best Animated Film of All Time’ at the Los Angeles Olympiad of Animation in 1984. - Ian Cross in an article in Animation journal.

There will always be a place in my heart in which a patient bull slowly turns a skipping rope...