The Soldier’s Tale
Originally made for Public Television, R.O. Blechman’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s theater piece combines a score of animation techniques within the illustrator’s eccentric, expressive personal style. A soldier returning from war makes a deal with the Devil, trading his violin for a book that tells the future. The message is ‘You can’t go home again’ with an added element of ‘No second chances.’ Presented here full length for the first time, with five minutes of prologue and epilogue. Plus extra R.O. Blechman animated shorts, TV commercials, etc.
The Soldier’s Tale
Blu-ray
Kino Classics
1984 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 56 min. / Street Date March 19, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring (voices): Max Von Sydow, Dusan Makavejev, Galina Panova, Andre Gregory, Theodore Gottlieb, Mike Mearian.
Designed by: R.O. Blechman
Animators: Maciek Albrecht, animator, Tissa David, Tony Eastman, John R. Gaug, Yvette Kaplan, Bill Littlejohn, Fred Mogubgub, Ed Smith, Dean Yeagle
Film Editors: Ernest Troost, Maria Patrick
Written by R.O Blechman from the libretto L’Histoire du soldat by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
Music by Igor Stravinsky from his L’Histoire du soldat
Musical Consultant: Arnold Black
Conductor: Gerard Schwartz
Executive Producer: Glenn Litton
Produced by Chloe Aron, R.O. Blechman
Directed by R.O. Blechman
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.
Kino Classics’ Blu-ray of The Soldier’s Tale is a good transfer from what is said to be R.O. Blechmann’s personal print. Colors and textures are quite good, and even if the picture doesn’t ‘pop’ it betters the old DVD, which had video flaws here and there. There’s no evidence of digital clean-up. At least one reel change has quite a bit of dirt attached, and even a changeover cue mark.
This print is five minutes longer than the earlier DVD, because PBS lopped off both a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue is a montage of silent movie clips describing the implosion of the art world that Igor Stravinsky was a part of, that started during World War One. The epilogue is a handsome live-action shot in Blechman’s company The Ink Tank, trucking across the artwork tables with scenes from the film in the works.
The video extras are fewer than were on the DVD, but they look better. A gentle animated film about the commercialization of Christmas is both funny and insightful. It carries two titles, No Room at the Inn up front, and Simple Gift at the end. The only other title confusion of that kind that we remember is on a cult horror film.
A longer video choice in the menu is a sample reel from illustrator-animator Blechman’s files, a compilation of animated TV commercials, title sequences, and parts of other animated shows, not identified. Those of us of a certain age (cough) will remember the clever talking stomach in Blechman’s antacid commercial, the one with two ducts coming out of the top of its head like wayward hairs. Another less familiar but effective animated spot looks at American cars that ‘eat one out of house and home.’
The audio commentary is from the old DVD. It’s been reformatted because of the addition of the prologue. Kino disc producer Bret Wood opens the show to explain that necessary adjustment. On the track, R.O. Blechman is joined by his animator Tissa David and his associate producer George Griffin. The lively conversation sticks mainly to the images on screen, as the three explain how scenes were divided up between their key animators. The artists really had a lot of personal leeway … the style of animation never settles on one ‘look,’ which in this case works well. They also comment on which scenes were inspired by famous artists, like Maxfield Parrish.
We are a little disappointed that we don’t get more discussion of how the show came about or how it was organized. We hear comments about budget restraints, and praise for one of the executive producers, and that’s about it.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
The Soldier’s Tale
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Very Good
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with R.O. Blechman, animator Tissa David, and associate producer George Griffin
No Room at the Inn, a short film by R.O. Blechman
The Hand of R.O. Blechman, a collection of animated shorts and commercials.
Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: June 22, 2024
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