now i hear i'm ok this is on t.v. the u.k. government is about tough measures in response to the street may have it sold more go wrong thousand six hundred arrests lots of companies prime minister has a little say you have these things for advice on how it's a whole gang fight that it's. fresh rallies against the raising costs of living are expected around israel for ten counts having already been in the streets for months now but african refugees living in tents permanently israelis i mean i was stunned

with the lack of social justice really. on the court has allowed two americans to see former u.s. defense secretary donald rumsfeld allegations of a man named they were illegally imprisoned in piece by u.s. troops bomb squad a private security contractors in iraq. next zazi spotlight plays host to a russian cartoonist and aunt director now working in the u.s. who explains why america's most successful animated shows including the simpsons they have a slight russian accent. hello

again and welcome to the spotlight million figure show and heartache i'll bring up and play my guest is me three. 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 russian roots so are several other super popular animated show in the u.s. how could this happen how the russians still coming or they're already there we're asking the simpsons are there to make it more like. it was a part of the award winning any nation studio called pilot after the fall of the soviet union he moved to america only to help create the country's best animated cartoons to join his friend and colleague david going off another challenged russian and

a class kitchen animation studio together they created one of the most successful animated the ninety's called rug rats the movie has also been our director for the simpsons movie and the television serious of the simpsons. you're welcome to the show thank you thank you very much for being with us well first of all here in russia as we just heard you worked in the best cartoon studio that that we had at that time and maybe maybe that. still is so why did you decide to move and start 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 that of a job for probably more than a year but listeria was already willing and canonically so when i got the

invitation from the president of course teachable. and definitely in cricklewood of insisted. on having me over there so i gladly accepted his invitation and at the time it was just invitation to come over for here probably to hand to see if i like it or not and we'll go from there that was a decision and we. went to los angeles. one year past 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 what do you think they decided to invite you they wanted they wanted you to somehow change and the the the the image in the face of the. american cartoons or what

i i believe the reason was that since our coverage your boy and his wife arlene claus keep they started their own studio basically in the bedroom of their apartment that's how they started the series. so probably governors business model was so. i have a studio which is not like any other studio so our he wanted the constant the addition of the protocol for fresh blood and him being an artist himself he really liked or water or even to do that and would sort of 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 and interest in animation itself. and the studio started to stone and

all that technically the official it still exists but it started the business well let's take a look at some of the recent russian animation success stories in a report by spotlight still in the do neither. impressionist painting is moving better how well xander petrov's cartoons are often described the artist is drawn release fingertips on gloss at the clinic with international recognition and the highest possible award an oscar russian cartoons have lately been more often nominated for the cademy awards than russian morris the latest nominee was a simplistic black and white animation by constantine brown's eat and although the oscars ski team then runs it can still bolster with least twenty international awards from the scuttles what might make russian animation particular interest into

western audiences is that there are you free clinics in which cartoons are gone during the times of the saga to learn russian animation industry enjoy it substantial state support which allowed for creativity and the russian coolness had to go through harsh adaptation to the market economy rules their creativity survived it was demonstrated to the fore in the ninety nine days when the moscow animations to do christmas did the series known as the animated shakespeare for the go to see half hour adaptations of shakespeare's plays produced using different animation dick nixon injured international success. russia's biggest commercial success an animation so far is the series shari keep the popularity of the retailer around barely care if it is so huge that it is susan was made to distribute the good german international but still the real pride of russian animation and non commercial projects reworked so what like the recently released carry more than

stop motion the ugly duckling with tchaikovsky's music as the soundtrack the only thing you should make in soft money are the current would be made if you always try to make a company so use my film. so. i think you will have the best people to ask what's the main difference between russian and american approaches to generation old examples of what we just saw. we can talk about success when. those are really deeply individual pieces in very great artists and not are it targeted towards. the mass production of the same soul of the same kind of that so we've got to we've got to we're going to our natural ventilation 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 or you ever saw it every several weeks could be so much different so of course. the authors of festival kind of animation is way much different from . their mission which is done for kryten networks there are so so many of them i've talked to a number of people working working in animation and this is strange they are usually 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 people like you who work for big studios in the west do you agree there are

probably probably again it really depends on the project because there are projects . where certain level of freedom is really welcome but again only a certain level when. we talk about russia lemaitre is working on their own pieces which may be not targeted directly to bring commercial success on your list but even more freedom is that what you try while that's always you know this as it is mother of invention so yeah when you. have a lot of limitations you really have to be extremely inventive so that really pushes you to words minority thing you said you said if he picture of 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 and i i had a chance to compare working on the mass production. animation and on like really individual. best of all oriented pieces 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 or they do not pay much so. if project like it worse was happening every other month i would be static about that but it just can't happen we are of the same generation you remember like in the seventy's i think the series union. appeared but cartoons for the adults new theme and love the garden for adults and this was

something need to do you think this is adequate to have curtains 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 information of course you know if it's all the edges. i i really don't like this approach when sometimes you have corners being part because there's all its foundation this is for kids it has to be simple or it has to be. maybe not that much you know creative and again it would 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 and creativity everybody's going to like it was 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 taken minutes and want to watch the theater and so they want to have those parents stay throughout the movie so it has to have some elements which will be of an interest that things are still parents as well at lest they have somebody who understands me because i have to go to the movies when i'm with my son 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 extatic about it i mean i mean i can't stand this is too much for me but there are movie i agree that there are great for kids and edible edible for adults and this is this i think right ok we're talking to dmitry milan and she just reminded he is the i our director of the simpsons movie spotlight will be back shortly we'll talk

more about his work in a minute after a break so don't go. dream you the latest in science technology from the realm. we've got a few jerks covered. for the full story we've got it for. the biggest issues get the cuban voice face to face with the news makers. welcome back to spotlight time i'll bring up in just reminded of my guest in the studio today is the milan each of the art director of the simpsons movie and also

he worked on the rug rats movie is that's true yes well. actually what you made the simpsons the series you made it into a full size widescreen movie what was the hardest part and while i'm working on that 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 you know what but what was it really hard i thought was really hard because two main challenges were about first of all of course translate the format which is familiar to a majority of the audience been seeing a lot like twenty inch screen and then you have to splash it over a hundred of those and screen in a movie theater and if you will just. project

it on such a huge screen it's not going to hold up to the. just in physics of the human vision because we're it's a much of yellow color and it's going to look as truly flatlined will become and also the technique that the techniques are here drawing it so it's because of all the protection it's going to be visible so. you have to use a lot of enhancements to basically fill out that it was like us as an object 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 are 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 dog out there no i had no doubt at all. the biggest challenge was you know knowing that it's nations who are 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 be the rate of success where will the movie. so it wasn't just it was just not disillusioning people and not disappointed but it was real success wasn't yes

but i was serious i was certainly hoping for that i was surprised what a big it's of. i have read in one of the interviews that you grant to one of the american papers that you work so hard and you were so much occupied. when you were in that movie that you were sort of depressed after it's all finished after the work was terminated is true while not depressed probably is not the right word. if. it's human nature you are getting used to extremely high pressure pretty much you know becomes your. way of life the way of thinking you start thinking yellow of the scene you know 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. you and need some time. to adapt to that because you described it the work work on this in this piece you described as working under restrictive conditions being very restrictive all over charlotte of that was mostly that very beginning of the project because of course are we started working on a project and the script was not still there it was changing it changing pretty much on a daily basis and creators they didn't quite know what to do with visuals of a movie it was not their main concern at that 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 i think the city of the show and we might lose something it's not going to be quite the same as it used to be. and that was a little bit. stands for quite some time later they actually be were we to busy with the visuals and that was a really 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 pretty happy about that. office of russians work and 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 sciences the guys are good nobel prize in physics this year they have a russian floor but a whole whole floor all the rooms they're all russians with the oh this is the russian but it doesn't happen in movies in the united states why russians represent the great school of cinematography why don't you flock together why don't you work as a team because because you quoted you want to do it to make american movies in america or because the producers try to keep your point and not. place your blind eye but i wouldn't say that there is a there is an attempt to really spread people around depending on their ethnicity actually at because 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 variation probably it's not very welcome to

have people of the same cultural group be in a locked out from the rest because initially i guess that in the 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 they isolated in a small group of their own something goes wrong communication wise that usually is a really bad science know so you think that you have to keep keep it multicultural and yes we're giving back the curtains nickelodeon a great channel a great a great. market for for for a cartoon do you think russia needs a channel like that absolutely absolutely and. of course from my not indicated standpoint or russia desperately needs any mater we do have little

content do we all know that that's a problem because there's there's tons of content imported content. nickelodeon is name 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 there's no truth why both that used to be post i don't know because when i was describing the situation in one of my interviews that was the end of the ninety's quite likely this. time this policy has changed at that point yes and that was one of the rules which were not pardon still but we've

been told several times that some projects it was working on and let's say all the events were taking place in i don't like seventeenth century. nickelodeon advised not to do so because they preferred to have. all the action take place in europe in a present time or in the future. you're probably eager to come under said in one of his interviews i quote i like to draw like children do in primitive tip meeks what do you think makes such technique. so tracked for contemporary artists in animation while our ego is a very strong artists and. yeah he might wish that he will drop like a kid even though he really admires the drawings that my daughter made when she was three years old he still has a few of them on his wall. kids they think their parent they are of their

different they have such a freedom in their life and at the same time they are not burdened with the years of training their lines and not straight or really thought out they just draw from hard and that probably in their means because he wants to make you sorry you're not really coming from your soul and from your heart the way kids do it is no reason why my son when he was about three four or five years of age 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 and 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 drawings when she was like three fighting like you know it's freedom yeah they did that really because you know several years passed and all you could see you know those princesses. you

know little dragons and extremely steve. is that it does not mean that an artist a true artist is the man that somebody who managed to sustain his fits keep his freedom while growing up. yes of course even going to see him since you know simpson is 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 switch to the high definition format. 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 the screen so with that transition to the high definition show became much more sophisticated visual wise yet at the same time i

kind of really strong the style just for very first years of same sense when it was really clumsy crude naive. and beautiful at the same time it was not so clearly drawn perspective. it was not sophisticated yet it had a 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 neatly 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're on tell your sense part like just drop me a line moved back with more first hand comments on what's going on in and outside this country and tell them to stay on our team and take care.