Nikolai Khodataev

Biography

In 1924 the director Yakov Protazanov hired three young artists to make sketches for his science fiction film “Aelita”. Nikolai Khodataev, Yuri Merkulov and Zenon Komissarenko proposed adding an animated sequence combined with live acting. Protazanov refused.

Khodataev then used his own money to set up an experimental animation workshop at the State School of Cinematography. Historians of Russian animation regard it as the first animation workshop in Russia.

He was born on 9 May 1892 (26 April, Old Style) in the Konstantinovskaya stanitsa (a Cossack settlement) in the Don Host Oblast, where his father, the official Pyotr Petrovich Khodataev, was serving. In 1898 the family moved to Moscow. Khodataev decided early to become an artist; his father was comfortably off and could pay for his education. At twenty, preparing to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he travelled to the Caucasus to paint landscapes. He graduated in 1918, when the school had already become Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school, continued studying in the architecture department and worked on a commission for the preservation of ancient monuments. His sister Olga Khodataeva also became an animator, and his brother Alexei was a musician. His first film, “Interplanetary Revolution” (1924), was a parody of “Aelita”. It was made in cutout animation, with flat movable figures, in the Constructivist style that was then at its peak. The following year came a state commission: “China in Flames”, a protest against European interference in the Chinese revolution. The Brumberg sisters, Ivan Ivanov-Vano and, by some accounts, Vladimir Suteev joined the team. Ivanov-Vano later recalled the test they set him when he joined. The film ran to about a thousand metres of film, more than fifty minutes at the projection speed of the time, and it is usually called the first Russian animated feature.

In 1926 Khodataev moved to Mezhrabpom-Rus, a film studio, and in 1928 to Sovkino, the state film organisation. There he made “One of Many” (1927), in which drawn animation appeared alongside live-action footage, and “The Samoyed Boy” (1928), which he made with his sister Olga and the Brumberg sisters. He called this story of a Nenets child “the first steps in conquering the tragedy genre”. In the same year he directed a live-action film, “Pushkin’s Housewarming”, which was banned. He wanted to experiment, while he was being asked for advertising and agitprop films, and this irritated him.

His last drawn films, “The Little Organ” (after Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin) and “Fialkin’s Career”, appeared in 1933–1934. By some accounts, their graphic style derived from the work of Vladimir Favorsky. Hardly anyone noticed the films. When Soyuzmultfilm was being formed and the Moscow studios were told to master the Disney manner, Khodataev left animation. I think he simply saw no place for himself in such a studio, though there are no words of his on the subject.

The remaining forty-odd years passed in obscurity. He wrote articles for the magazines “Soviet Screen” and “Soviet Cinema”, worked with the theatre director Natalya Sats and illustrated filmstrips. Those close to him recalled that he drew always and everywhere; many portraits, especially of women, and landscapes survive. In later years he worked in sculpture and easel painting and took part in exhibitions. He appears in the film “The World of Animation – Animation of the World” (2002).

Khodataev died in Moscow on 27 December 1979. He was survived by his daughter Nela and his son Konstantin, also an artist.