well you could argue that but you could argue much more closer to home because you don't have to go to india you have to look at the poor people in united states i mean poor people the united states spend upwards of seventy percent of their of their income on basic necessities i mean i'm talking about housing food and clothing. you know if you're spending seventy percent of your income on housing food and clothing and there's a serious rise in prices you know it's going to hit you and it's going to hurt you a lot you know i wrote a paper about this that i think i estimated that huey to be effective. in terms of commodity inflation as it would reach to agriculture products would affect roughly eighty percent of the u.s. population so you don't have to go looking for poor people in india to see how this beggar thy neighbor policy is going to affect people you just have to go to the middle classes and lower middle classes of the united states to see how it's going to hurt them back in bel-air thanks so much for being on the kaiser report it's a pleasure being on thank you for having me all right that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacey everett our thank

my guests gonzalo lira if you want to send me an email please do this at kaiser reporting r t v are you until next time this is. great for the food we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers.

if you move. from phones to. t.v. . broadcasting live from our studios in central moscow this is our. lawyers for wiki leaks founder julian assange claim he could be facing. even the death penalty if he's tried in the u.s. this comes as he appears in court in the u.k.

fighting a swedish extradition and washington is investigating possible criminal charges against the song over the release of classified documents. insists it does not need a bank bailout as it comes under pressure from germany and france to head off a potential euro zone crisis portugal is widely seen as the next to be bailed out if it doesn't regain investor confidence the country represents less than two percent of the blocks of gross domestic product but experts fear a knock on effect that could bring down the much larger spanish economy. icebreakers reach the last vessel trapped in freezing waters off russia's far east coast treacherous weather conditions have hampered the fortnight long rescue operation more than three hundred cruise ship. off talks to art director dmitri about well loved american cartoons and about how russia fits into their brightly colored picture.

hello again and welcome to the spotlight show and party. today my guest is. the simpsons has become so popular in the united states it made it to the big screen but only few people know that this typical american family actually has aggression route so are several other super popular animated show in the u.s. how could this happen are the russians still coming or are there already there we're asking the simpsons are there. was a part of the award winning any missions to your cold pilot but after the fall of the soviet union he moved to america only to help create the country's best

animated cartoons he joined his friend and colleague david going off another talented russian and the cost animation studio together they created one of the most successful animated good to the ninety's called rug rats the movie demon has also been a director for the simpsons movie and the television serious the simpsons. and she was into the show thank you thank you very much for being with us well first of all he in russia as we just heard you worked in the best cartoon studio that that we had at that time and maybe maybe the best still is so why did you decide to move. working in the u.s. for economic reasons for for political reasons certainly not political ones. probably economical reasons at the time at ninety four i was down of

a job for probably more than a year by listeria was already dwindling economically so when i got the invitation from the president of the class. and definitely a group of out of insisted. on having me over there so i gladly accepted his invitation and at that time it was just invitation to come over for a year probably two and to see if i like it or not and we'll go from there that was the decision and we went to los angeles and one year passed another one and i'm still there well. it makes make stuff which is pretty different from what you were making when you were working here in russia and they knew that so why do you think if you have an opinion on this matter why do

you think they decided to invite you they wanted they wanted you to somehow change and the the the the image the face of the. american cartoons or what. i believe the reason was that since. chip and his wife eileen claussen they started their own studio basically in the bedroom of their apartment that's how they started their series rug rats so probably governor's business model was to. i have a studio which is not like any other studio so he wanted the constant addition of the prob out of the fresh blood and him being an artist himself he really liked what igor did and what they saw that animation. he was a huge fan of it so all he constantly infused fresh blood from western europe i believe that was the reason and at the time and that was pretty successful. later

his policy changed he lost a little bit an interest in an emission itself. and the studio started to stall a little bit more technically that official it still exists but it's out of the business well let's take a look at some of the recent russian animation success stories and the report by spotlights in the demeter. impressionist painting is moving that's how alexander petrov's cartoons are often described the artist is drawn when released fingertips on gloss the technique brought him international recognition and the highest possible award an oscar russian cartoons have lately been more often nominated for the cademy awards than russian movies the latest nominee was a simplistic black and white animation my constantine bronze eat and although the oscar risky team then against to boast of at least twenty international awards for

his cartoons what might make russian animation particular interest in to western audiences is that their idea of cliques and which cartoons are done to really terms of the soviet union the russian animation industry enjoyed substantial state support which allowed for creativity and the russian petunias had to go through harsh adaptation to market economy their creativity survived it was demonstrated to the full in the ninety nine. when the most cool animations to do christmas did the series known as then they made it shakespeare for the b.b.c. half hour adaptations of shakespeare's plays produced using different animation dick nixon enjoyed international success russia's biggest commercial success an animation so far is the series shari keep the popularity of the little round belly characters is so huge that it is season was made to distribute the good to an

international but still the real pride of russian animation a non commercial project really works of art like the recently released harry borden stop motion the ugly duckling with tchaikovsky's music as the soundtrack only where you should make money out of current would be made at the all destroy cartoon making company so use made film. and i think you are the best people to ask what's the main difference between russian and american approaches to. well all the examples what we just saw. we can talk about success when. those are really deeply individual pieces been made by great artists and. targeted towards. you know mass production of the same episode of the same kind of episode like we've got to we've

got to witness that child's animation is really great and it is great. and mainly because of that he does what he feels he has to do and exactly the way. he feels it has to be done i can easily imagine that if it was. really on a production level new episode every several weeks it would have been so much different so of course. author's festival kind of animation is way much different from. the mission which is done for cartoon network's there's so many of them i've talked to a number of people working working in animation and this is strange they usually not the not the people working in the movies but people working in cartoons in russia say here they have more freedom then they would have had in their colleagues

have the people like you who work for big studios in the west do you agree. probably probably again it really depends on the project because there are projects . where certain level of freedom is really welcomed but again only a certain level when. we talk about russian animators working on their own which maybe not targeted directly to bring commercial success so you know let's believe the more freedom is that what you try while that's always the you know necessity is mother of invention so yeah when you. have a lot of limitations you really have to be extremely in with inventive so that really pushes you to wards more and more creativity you said you said if he petroff had to do an episode every week yes are you envious to people that who

don't have to do an episode every week would you prefer to work this way rather than doing commercially successful. i i had a chance to compare working on the mass production. animation and on like really individual. festival oriented this is a by. from creative standpoint it's much more interesting and. there are really no boundaries for creativity on the project the problem is that they happen like once every five years. they last for six months they do not pay much. so. if a project like it was happening every other month i would be ecstatic about that but it just cannot happen we we are of the same generation you remember like in the

seventy's i think in the series union. as your honor appeared cartoons for the adults like me feel middle of the garden for adults and this was something new do you think this is adequate to have cartoons for children for help for snow white and the seven dwarfs i watched it the other day i think it's for absolutely for adults and only for the kids love it. good animation of course you know if it's all the edges. i i really don't like this approach when sometimes a lot of corners been caught because. this is for kids it has to be simple it has to be. maybe not that much you know creative and again it could be extremely simple because kids are rather stupid and they don't understand the difference between good and really good so it can be simple i don't buy into this theory so if.

animation piece is done for kids but. it's done with a great effort to and creativity everybody's going to like it because like in america it is extremely important even when the project is oriented towards the kids kids not going to go to the theater by themselves they're going to go with parents so it is very important so that the parents not going to get bored in the first fifteen minutes and want to walk out of the theater so they wouldn't want to have those parents stay throughout the movie so it has to have some elements which will be of interest of interest to parents as well at last i have somebody who understands me because i have to go to the movies with my side and when i have to well when i have to go i have to go and watch with them movies like avatar and he he's ecstatic about it i mean i mean i can't stand this is to much for me but the only thing i agree that there are great for kids and edible edible for adults and

this is this is i think great ok we're talking to dmitri nature just a minute here the i'd our director of the simpsons movie spotlight will be back shortly we'll talk more about his work in a minute after the break so don't go. hungry for the full story we've got it for. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers on. issues that so much to stomach for you are some of the look in the mark one year around this traffic the earthquake haiti remains prospects bleak what has gone so wrong for this impoverished.

welcome back to spotlight i'm al green of in just reminded of my guest in the studio today is dimitri milan each of the art director of the simpsons movie and also he worked on the rug rats movie that's true yes well. mitri what you made the simpsons the series you made it into a full science widescreen movie what was the hardest part of more on working on that big because we all we all are used to simpsons being like a series like like like like little nothing like a smile that said but what what was it was it really hot it was really hard because two main challenges were about first of all of course translate the format which is familiar to majority of the audience been seen or not like twenty inch screen and then you have to splash it over a hundred feet of screen in

a movie theater and if you will just. projected on such a huge screen it's not going to hold up to the. just even physics of the human vision because way too much of yellow color and it's going to look is terribly flat line will become and also the need that the technique that you're drawing it so yes it goes on all their attention is going to be visible so you have to use a lot of enhanced moments to basically fill out that it was up to us as another director to get is to change it to come up with ideas but the second challenge which pretty much cancels out the first challenge was to make it in such a way so that nobody would notice it again simpsons is such an icon in american culture you do not treat it with such a freedom so that it changes its look and starts to look like something different

that was the main goal of the creators of the movie not to make it like a one huge extended episode but it has to it had to stay true to the origins of the t.v. series and what about another thing. ask yourself a question is anybody going to go to the movies and buy a ticket to watch this for two hours to know that they now had i had no down there no i had no doubt at all. the biggest challenge was you know knowing that expectations were so high is what the expectation is is not to disappointed not to go again the biggest fear was that it would look just overly extended t.v. episode and. we just you know had no right to make that mistake so the stakes were really high. and this year expects the rate of success you got

where will the movie. the it wasn't just it was just not disillusioning people in the disappointed but it was real success was that yes while i was seriously i was certainly hoping for that i was surprised quite a bit that it's of. i have read in one of the. interviews that he had gone to one of the american papers that you worked so hard and you were so much occupied. when you worked in that movie that you were sort of a depressed after it all finished after the work was terminated is that true while not depressed probably is not the right word. it's human nature you're getting used to an extremely high pressure pretty much you know becomes your. way of life the way of thinking you start thinking yellow. scene yellow in

your dreams or nightmares so when the whole thing stops it really is very abrupt and bizarre feeling because the world goes back to what it used to move yeah and you need some time to adapt to that because you described it the work work on this in this piece you describe you have as working under restrictive conditions being very restrictive what i want to do is that was mostly the very beginning of the project because of course we started working on a project and the script was not still there it was changed late changing pretty much on a daily basis and creators they didn't quite know what to do with. visuals of the movie it was not their main concern at the point so they wanted

something by they didn't quite know what they want at some point the consensus on their side was that it's probably going to be safer just to go with what we used to have for the t.v. series and not do anything because again we start tampering with it and we lose some authenticity of the show and might lose something it's not going to be quite the same as it used to be. and that was a little bit. chance for quite some time later be actually they were way too busy with the visuals and that was really a blessing in disguise because they just forgot even to think about the way the movie is going to look so at that time i was pretty much free to come up with solutions that i in the end offered to them and they were really happy about that.

lots of russians work in movies in the united states lots of russians in hollywood . but we never see them working as a teen i mean as a russian teen. it occurred to me when i when i read about these scientists the guys are good nobel prize and physically see they have a russian floor like a whole whole floor or all the rooms they're all russians where all this is the russian fly but it doesn't happen in movies in the united states why russians represent a great school of cinematography why don't you flock together why don't you work as a team because because you quit it you want to do it to make american movies in america or because the producers try to keep your point and not the cheer and that let you fly i but i wouldn't say that there is a there is an attempt to really spread people around depending on their ethnicity actually at the class teachable there was some moment where

a group of three or four maybe five russians were working together as a team but. i don't know it's just my observation probably it's not very welcomed to have people of the same cultural group been locked out from from the rest because initially i guess that in live action movies it's the same communication is the key it's extremely important to communicate with all the other people and when the people start to being locked out and being isolated in a small group of their own something goes wrong communication wise and that usually is a really bad science so you think that that you have to keep keep it multicultural and yes we're getting back to cartoons nickelodeon a great channel a great a great. market for for for a cartoon do you think russia needs a channel like think that absolutely absolutely and. of course from my not

indicated standpoint russia desperately needs an image that we do have to do with content do we all know that that's the problem because there's there's tons of content like imported content. nickelodeon d.n.a. and there's thousands of projects which could easily fill out the space on the such channels i strongly believe that russia needs its own content and nickelodeon has a very very strict requirements for animators for example they don't allow cartoons events of the past is that is that true why that used to be published i don't know because when i was describing the situation in one of my interviews that was the end of ninety's quite likely this. time this policy has changed at

that point yes said that was one of the rules which were not carved in stone but we've been told several times that some projects that were was working on and let's say all the events were taken place in i don't like seventeenth century. nickelodeon advise does not to do so because they preferred to have all the action take place in either you know present time or in the future. your colleague said in one of his interviews i quote i like to draw like children do in primitive techniques what do you think makes such technique. tracked for contemporary artists in animation while our ego is very strong artists and. yeah he might wish that here he will draw like

a kid even though he really admires let's say the drawings that my daughter made when she was like three years old he still has a few of them are on his wall. kids' day they think different they are there different they have such a freedom in their life and at the same time they are not burdened with the years of training in their lines and not straight or really thought out they just draw from heart and that what probably eager means because he wants to make you know really coming from your soul and from your heart the way kids do it is that the reason why my son when he was about three four five years of age he did wonderful drawings i had them as he said on the wall but now he's like eleven and they and they try to teach him to draw in school he's awfully he i mean he's worse than anybody i've ever seen the same happened to my daughter i was absolutely sure

that i have a genius on my hands because she was doing absolutely amazing darwin's when she was like three five year olds freedom yeah they was that good because you know several years passed and all you could see you know those princes. you know little dragons and extremely steve said in the. lesson is that it does that mean that an artist a true artist is the man that somebody who managed to sustain his fight to keep his freedom while growing up. yes of course even going to see him since you know since becoming bigger louder brighter the huge change even from technical standpoint and thirty six ten point happened about two years ago when the show was switched to high definition for met. again the typical normal t.v. screen in the average american household it's not a twenty inch tube anymore it's like a fifty inch plasma so

a lot of information has to fill out this screen so with that transition to the high definition show became much more sophisticated visual wise yet at the same time i have really strong for very first years of simpsons when it was really clumsy crude naive. and beautiful at the same time it was not so clearly drawn perspective buys it was not sophisticated yet it had really strong sense of passion which was coming from creators thank you thank you very much for being with us and just a reminder that my guest in the studio today was to meet the maligned chip our director of the simpsons movie and also the rug rats that's it for now from all of us here if you don't have your sense spotlight just drop me a line we'll be back with more first hand comments on what's going on in and outside this country until then stay on r.t. can take.