Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Snow Queen
1957 · Lev Atamanov · The Snow Queen on Sightlines
A small girl walks into the snow. For long stretches of Lev Atamanov's The Snow Queen, Gerda is hardly bigger than a mark on the painted field, a warm speck crossing a plain of blue and white that recedes as far as the background painters could push it. What holds you is the way she walks. She doesn't bounce the way cartoon children usually do. Her weight settles into each step, and she bends into the cold the way a real child would. That's because, somewhere behind the drawing, a real person once performed that walk for a camera.
Start with that walk, because it shows something Gilles Deleuze cared about. In the first of his two books on cinema, he argued that film is new because it builds movement out of ordinary moments sampled at an even rate. A painter or sculptor picks the grand, decisive pose; the film camera records whatever moment comes next. He called these moments "any-instant-whatever." He also insisted that animated cartoons belong fully to cinema, because a drawn figure on film is never a finished pose. It is always in the middle of forming or dissolving.
Soyuzmultfilm took that almost literally. Through the 1950s the Moscow studio relied on rotoscoping: live actors were filmed playing the scenes, and their movement guided the animators' drawings. So Gerda is assembled from the unremarkable instants of a real body. Her fear shows in her shoulders. Her stubbornness shows in her posture. In this film the drama lives in the small gestures between the big moments.
Now look at her enemy. The Snow Queen barely moves. Maria Babanova voices her with a cool, exact authority, and the drawing matches the voice: tall, elegant, still, her power carried by how little she has to do. She belongs to the opposite pole, to what Deleuze, borrowing from the philosopher Henri Bergson, called "privileged instants": the posed, sculpted, complete form. Atamanov's real invention is that he stages the conflict as two ways of moving. A girl drawn from life, all hesitation and effort, goes up against a figure who has already struck her final pose. Watch for it, and the fairy tale turns into an argument about what a living body is.
The story runs on what Deleuze called the action-image, the main mode of classical cinema: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. In its large form, a whole situation presses on the hero until she has to act. Here the situation is plain from the start. Kai's heart has been frozen by a shard of an enchanted mirror, and he has been carried off. Gerda goes after him. The film advances in self-contained episodes: the enchantress's flower garden, the royal court, the robbers' forest, the far North. Each one is what Deleuze calls an "encompasser," a world that surrounds the heroine and demands a response. Between them the film breathes. Vast receding snowfields alternate with the thin, taut line of her march, and the accumulated episodes add up to a real sense of distance.
Classical action cinema loves a duel, force against force. Deleuze calls it the binomial. The Snow Queen keeps the duel and changes its weapons. Gerda's weapon is steadfast affection, and the film takes her agency completely seriously. So the duel is fought in color. Home, hearth and the summer garden are ambers, reds and greens; the Queen's domain is blues, whites and steel grays. Deleuze writes of color that absorbs a whole scene and its feeling, and that is what happens here. Every cut tells you the temperature of the heart. Warm doesn't always mean safe, either. The enchantress's garden is all abundance and enclosure, a warmth that holds you in place.
Then there is the palace. It is a triumph of negative space and cold light, its emptiness and scale used to make Kai look tiny. Deleuze had a name for spaces like this, "any-space-whatever": voids that no longer work as a stage for action. He found them mostly in postwar European cinema, in emptied cities and blank rooms. Atamanov puts one inside a children's fairy tale in 1957 and makes it the villain's home. That raises the question this film leaves you with: why does the coldest place in it feel the most modern? The film's answer is to treat emptiness as something to be crossed. Later cinema would sometimes choose to stay there.
The palace also has a family tree. Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the first surviving feature-length animated fairy tale, set silhouettes against flat luminous fields. That storybook tableau of figure and void is the grammar of the Queen's halls. Soyuzmultfilm was consciously modeled in its early years on Disney, and the debt to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942) shows in the rotoscoped human realism, the multiplane depth and the painterly, diffused backgrounds. There is an irony in that. The country of Eisenstein's colliding montage produced a film whose cutting puts clarity ahead of collision. Closer to home, Ivanov-Vano's The Humpbacked Horse (1947) fixed the studio's idiom of painted fairy-tale backgrounds and episodic quests, and Atamanov inherited it whole. His own The Scarlet Flower (1952) rehearsed this kind of sincere, reference-based performance, and The Golden Antelope (1954) worked out the warm-against-cold color drama and the measured episodic cutting. In The Snow Queen, that color scheme stops being decoration and becomes the subject: a story about a frozen heart, told in temperatures.
Made during the post-Stalin Thaw, the film recasts Andersen's Christian motifs as secular loyalty and courage. Then it traveled. It was dubbed into many languages, and an American version at the end of the 1950s added a live-action introduction. It reached children and filmmakers far outside the Soviet bloc. Hayao Miyazaki has named it among the works that confirmed his commitment to animation. That is its significance. A state studio's domestic fairy tale showed that hand-drawn animation could carry serious drawn acting, a heroine whose strength is constancy rather than force, and a world whose emotions you read in its colors. Much of the later history of hand-drawn animation takes those things for granted.
So when you watch it, watch the bodies. See who hesitates and who holds still. Notice the color shift at every cut. And when Gerda is a speck on that endless white, remember that a real walk is under the drawing, one ordinary instant after another, carrying warmth into a space built to have none.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — Rotoscoping (the 'éclair' method): live actors filmed and their continuous movement used to guide the drawings, giving Gerda a weighted, naturalistic gait and small gestures of fear and determination
- privileged instants — The Snow Queen drawn as statuesque and coolly imperious, her power expressed through economy of movement and stillness, against Gerda's rotoscoped motion
- action-image (large form) — Kai's frozen heart and abduction set up an overall situation that calls Gerda into an episodic quest of trials meant to recover him
- the encompasser — Self-contained episodic milieus (the enchantress's flower garden, the royal court, the robbers' forest, the far North), each with its own tone, each testing the heroine
- binomial — The duel between Gerda and the Snow Queen, fought with steadfast affection rather than force, warmth of the heart against literal and figurative cold
- respiration-space — Receding painted snowfields alternating with Gerda's tiny moving figure; the accumulated episodes build the sense of distance she covers
- affective color — Warm ambers, reds and greens for home, hearth and the summer garden against the cold blues, whites and steel grays of the Queen's domain, so the journey reads as a passage between temperatures of feeling
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — The Queen's palace staged in negative space and cold light, its emptiness and scale used to isolate the tiny figure of Kai