The animated movie that started production in 1981 and still isn’t finished
Due to the levels of artistry required in both its hand-drawn and computerised forms, making an animated movie is a painstaking process that can take a number of years. However, in the case of The Overcoat, more than 40 is seriously pushing it.
Director Yuri Norstein is considered among the finest animators the industry has ever known, but even though his feature-length filmography has lain stagnant since the release of Tale of Tales in 1979, he’s far from retired. Instead, he’s decided to make it his life’s mission to bring The Overcoat to the screen come hell or high water, even with the finished product showing no signs of arriving anytime soon.
Based on the 1842 short story by Nikolai Gogol, the relatively straightforward plot follows a government employee in need of a new coat. He saves up to have one made, but then it gets stolen from him during a celebratory evening with his friends before he ultimately freezes to death when the government refuses to lend an assist. It isn’t Pixar, then, but nor should it realistically be spending four decades in development.
Norstein holds the source material in such high regard that he admitted it was held in the same level of personal esteem as the Bible, with work officially underway in 1981. Five years later and with only ten minutes completed, the filmmaker was fired from the studio where he’d worked for almost 20 years despite the rapturous levels of acclaim that had greeted his work.
Setting up his own animation studio, funding has proven hard to come by, which is one of the major reasons why The Overcoat has been coming along at a snail’s pace. Norstein is selective over who he allows to contribute, though, once telling the Russian Minister of Culture that he “cannot take money from those who don’t care about you”. Nick Park’s Aardman stepped in to try to lend financial assistance, but Norstein would only allow their generosity to extend as far as a few lightbulbs, per Camden New Journal.
The death of cinematographer and long-time collaborator Aleksandr Zhukovskiy slowed things down further in 1999 before Maksim Granik was drafted in as a replacement two years later. A three-year hiatus would follow after that when Norstein decided to dedicate a year and a half to a three-minute animation that served as the intro to a children’s TV show before another nine months were lost as he delivered a two-minute sequence for the Japanese anthology Winter Days.
23 years after beginning his labour of love, the director confirmed that only 25 minutes of The Overcoat had been completed. A lot of people have offered to help, but the man has truly earned his nickname of ‘The Golden Snail’ by repeatedly iterating how his team will only complete his passion project at their own pace and in their preferred surroundings.
Now into his 80s, the first 20 minutes of The Overcoat have at least been screened at various points as part of assorted exhibits displaying Norstein’s work. As of yet, there’s no sign of the whole shebang reaching the finish line, never mind securing a release date, with his languid approach further underlined by his adamance from the very start that the film only runs for around an hour.
