Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy

Biography

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Tsekhanovskiy is Soviet artist and director of animation. Honored Artist of the Russian SFSR (1964). Graduate of the First St. Petersburg Gymnasium. He began to paint in the gymnasium, in 1908-1910 he worked in Paris in a private sculpture workshop; In 1911-1914 he studied at the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (did not graduate), then studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg), in 1918 he graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. From 1918 to 1923 Tsekhanovskiy served in the Red Army, where he was engaged in applied art and sculpture, then returned to Petrograd, where he continued his studies in applied work and worked as an instructor-artist at the State Art and Industrial College. Since 1926, Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy worked at the Rainbow Publishing House and in the children's editorial board of Lengiz on illustrations of children's and youth books, next to Vladimir Lebedev. Tsekhanovskiy also printed the so-called "movie books" - "The Ball", "Bim-Bom", "Train", when throwing the pages of which created a short animation containing some cinematic techniques. From 1928 to 1936 and from 1938 to 1942, Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy was a director-animator at the Leningrad film factory Sovkino (then Lenfilm). The first film work of Tsekhanovskiy was the cartoon Pochta (1929), based on his own illustrations for the book of Samuil Marshak, and developing the constructivist method implemented in the book. In 1929, Tsekhanovskiy, along with Evgeny Shoplo and Arseniy Avraamov, stood at the origins of the "drawn sound" - synthesizing musical works by means of graphic representation of sound tracks on film. In 1930, a voiced version of Pochta (1929) was released, which became the first Soviet sound cartoon. It became the first Soviet cartoon to have a wide audience, the first Soviet cartoon to be widely shown abroad, and the hand-painted version became the first Soviet color film. Since 1942, Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy was the director of the Soyuzmultfilm studio. His animated films have repeatedly won prizes at international festivals.