Oscar for Best Animated Short Film – The Old Man and the Sea (1999)

This animation was adapted by director Alexander Petrov in 1999 based on the classic novel "The Old Man and the Sea" by the famous American novelist Hemingway. Shows a high level of technical level, completely created on glass.

Alexander Petrov used his fingertips as paintbrushes, and he was the only animator in the world to use his fingertips to apply oil paint. Petrov was an expert at making 9- to 12-inch films, but this time he had to switch to 30-inch for a glass-panel painting. Big-screen films require him to be meticulously crafted, or the slightest omission will be magnified on the screen.

Petroloff drew each frame on the glass panel with his fingers dipped in oil paint. He believes that it is easier to paint with fingers, you can paint faster, and you can paint whatever you want, and fingers are the most direct way to communicate between the mind and painting. He uses different layers of glass to make, making figures on one floor and backgrounds on another layer, with lights shooting through the glass layer by layer, and then he takes the next picture by controlling the wet color on the glass.

In this film, the process is repeated 29,000 times, a painstaking effort that lasts nearly three years. The process of the old man's struggle with the sea and the big fish in the film is a vivid portrayal of Petrov's hard work. The Old Man and the Sea has been highly acclaimed around the world and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and the Annecy International Animation Festival Best Animated Short Film Award.

Hemingway was always trying to create some sort of determined and rigid image, but he was always running away from his fate as a human being. Although Kafka had a cowardly personality and spent his whole life avoiding it, he always spoke seriously with his inner voice and faced his soul.

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In fact, the story of the old man and the sea is a real thing, and the old fisherman in the text is a friend of Hemingway's named Gregorio Fuentes.

[I always thought it was Hemingway who made it up... 】

After the end of World War I, Hemingway moved to Cuba and met Gregorio Fuentes, an old fisherman. In 1930, Hemingway's ship sank in a storm, and Fuentes rescued Hemingway. Since then, Hemingway and Fuentes have formed a deep friendship and often go out to sea together to fish.

In 1936, Fuentes went far to sea to catch a big fish, but because the fish was too big, it dragged at sea for a long time, only to be attacked by sharks on the way home, and returned with only a skeleton left.

In April 1936, Hemingway published an essay in the squire magazine titled "On Clear Water: Letters from the Bay," in which a passage recounted the story of an old man who went out to sea alone in a small boat and caught a huge marlin, but most of the fish was eaten by sharks. At that time, this incident deeply touched Hemingway and realized that it was a good novel material, but he never had the opportunity to write about it!

Shortly after Christmas in 1950, Hemingway developed a strong desire to create, and in his villa "Viewing Society" on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, he began to write "The Old Man and the Sea" (originally titled "The Existing Sea"). By February 23, 1951, the first draft had been completed, and it took only eight weeks. In April, Hemingway sent the manuscript to friends who visited him in Cuba for circulation, which won unanimous praise.

The old man and the sea, after reading this short story, finally understood the meaning of the old man, the struggle with the shark in despair, the unremitting efforts for the ideal (martinfish), until in the end, although it failed, the martinfish only had a skeleton left, but won the admiration of the whole village, and won something more valuable than the fish - honor. At the end, the boy plays by the seashore, representing the inheritance of the spirit. As my high school teacher said, "After watching the old man and the sea, if you feel it, it means that you are evolving from a boy to a man." ”