The mysterious and somewhat disturbing animated feature The Soldier’s Tale is revived every so often; I believe we first caught it on PBS in the early 1990s and were thoroughly unnerved. Its designer and director is R.O. Blechman, a celebrated illustrator best known for his expressive cartoons in The New Yorker.
Are our public television stations now completely privatized? The 1980s were boom years for American Public Television, and The Soldier’s Tale was underwritten by WGBH in Boston, a producing entity that always guaranteed quality.
The story source is a 1918 theatrical work composed by Igor Stravinsky while staying in Switzerland during the Russian revolution. Its libretto was written by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz; when performed intact the presentation included a ballet component. The story is still about an unfortunate soldier’s deal with the Devil, with the original’s descent into chaos and tragedy left intact. This new Blu-ray repeats a filmmaker commentary from a 2004 Kino DVD, which answers some questions but not others.
A soldier (voice: Dusan Makavejev) gets leave to go home and while walking the long road dreams of the welcome he’ll get, especially the promised marriage to the girl of his dreams (Galina Panova). But he’s distracted by the Devil (Max von Sydow), a slick-talking fellow who gets him to trade his beloved violin for a special book holding the secret to riches. The soldier delays his arrival and achieves his financial goals, but when he returns home discovers that years must have passed. The townspeople think he’s a ghost, and his beloved has married another and now has a child. Trading his riches back to the devil to recover his violin, The soldier travels to a kingdom where a princess has fallen into a trance. He feels certain that he can revive her with his music …
First broadcast just after Thanksgiving in 1984, this fully animated PBS special is a haunting, emotionally affecting musical fable, and a showcase for R. O. Blechman’s distinct character style. Founding an animation studio called The Ink Tank, Blechman attracted attention with a clever 1977 short subject called No Room at the Inn, or Simple Gifts. It is included as an extra on this disc. His distinctive minimalist drawing style, already familiar from magazine covers, also featured in some memorable television commercials.
Bad Things Just Happen.
The Soldier’s Tale is a darn good animated film that complements Stravinsky’s music well. The story has a dark, sinister undertone. A nice-guy veteran just wants to live, yet throws a shadow over his life by following a Devil-inspired quest for material wealth. As a moral fable, it is very much a downer — no solution is offered for the hero’s dilemma. The Devil’s enticements seem extraneous, unless one interprets demonic influence as the character’s inner psychological flaw. The soldier makes the usual mistakes in value judgment, but the Cosmos seems against him. Life breaks up into chaos no matter what one does. The wild torment of the ending does not feel deserved.
We expect an anti-war theme that never materializes. The soldier’s home is not obliterated in his absence, but he loses everything he values anyway. At the end he’s still living in fantasy memories, with the idea that his dear mother is happy and waiting for him to show up. But the sense of stumbling through one’s life without control, with good fortune that never coalesces into lasting, satisfying happiness, seems a universal experience. Even without its Faust elements The Soldier’s Tale serves up what is essentially a Kafka-esque horror story. It reminds us a a little of the first episode of the Japanese classic Kwaidan, about a greedy samurai who returns to the loving wife he abandoned years before. He’s received with open and forgiving arms, but something is amiss.
The saving grace of The Soldier’s Tale is a prevailing feeling of grace and beauty. When the soldier picks a flower, his imagination runs ahead over the hills to picture an idyllic future. Without slavishly following each note of the music, the animation expresses its changing tones – as when the soldier’s wedding procession is jostled by gusts of wind. Does the wind augur bad tidings, suggesting that the soldier already has hidden doubts?
R.O. Blechman’s style of illustration-cartooning has always appealed. His squiggly lines soon reveal themselves as expressive as artwork more finely drafted. Blechman is the film’s overall designer, with his style interpreted by a score of artisan-animators. The insubstantial line images are often backed by grey shadowings that make the simplest shapes evoke people with personalities. Appearing in various guises, the devil is a consistent threat despite few if any outward signs of malice; the voicework of Max von Sydow helps greatly in that. When emotions become intense the semi-realistic images sometimes break up into abstract chaos. The taste and discretion employed is remarkable. With its good fit between theme and style, The Soldier’s Tale makes the Italian antimated feature Allegro non troppo look as if it’s working too hard.
Von Sydow’s voice is matched by the expressive accent of Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, as the soldier hero. Andre Gregory provides the sparse narration, and Theodore Gottlieb (‘Brother Theodore’) a couple of distinctive character voices.
Although it has a lot of politicized imagery, The Soldier’s Tale doesn’t push any particular ideology. That’s even with a Russian soldier hero and a negative view of capitalistic success. The third act brings in a side order of crass commecialization and the marketing of human life by the media. But there’s no political alternative for sale, just a yearning for conventional virtues like music from the heart and loved ones at home. The final act’s castle & kingdom subplot almost doesn’t fit, until we realize that the soldier is grasping at straws for a second chance at happiness. Again, the repeated message is that straying from one’s heart’s path is a grave, uncorrectable mistake — the chilling ending is less like The Wizard of Oz, and more like The Long Good Friday. The messages in folk tales are often ambiguous, but this soldier doesn’t seem to have much of a real choice in anything. What holds our attention is the beautiful way Blechman’s images and the Stravinsky music go together.
