Vladimir Suteev

Biography

Suteev was equally skilled with both hands and, so it is said, could write with one while drawing with the other at the very same time. For a man who would later compose books in which text and picture cannot be separated, the ability seems almost symbolic.

His first book of his own, “Two Tales about the Pencil and the Paints”, came out in 1952, and Korney Chukovsky welcomed it with a review in Literaturnaya Gazeta. The author was nearly fifty, with a quarter of a century of animation and a war behind him.

Vladimir Suteev was born on 5 July 1903 in Moscow. His father, Grigory Osipovich, a graduate of Moscow University, was a dermatologist and mycologist, later a professor, who in his spare time painted, sang and gave concerts at the Assembly of the Nobility. A close friend of the household was the sculptor Stepan Erzya, for whom Vladimir’s mother, Zinaida Vasilievna, sat as a model; it was Erzya who influenced the boy most of all. Vladimir began his education at the 11th Boys’ Gymnasium and finished it at what had by then become a Soviet school. From the age of fourteen he earned money on the side: he drew diagrams for public health exhibitions and diplomas for the winners of sports competitions, worked as an orderly in a Red Army hospital and taught physical education to the younger pupils. He enrolled in the civil engineering faculty of the Moscow Higher Technical School, but drawing won out. He first became known as a caricaturist, and from 1927 he drew for Murzilka.

In 1924 Suteev entered the art department of the State Technical School of Cinematography, where his brother Vyacheslav and his cousin Dmitry Bogolepov, both later directors of popular science films, studied alongside him. While still a student he joined the school’s experimental group of animators, together with Yuri Merkulov, Nikolai Khodataev, Zenon Komissarenko and Daniil Cherkes. His debut was “China in Flames” (1925), one of the first Soviet cut-out films: the album method of animation was tried on it for the first time, and it ran for more than fifty minutes. At the same time he drew film posters for foreign pictures released in the Soviet Union, from “The Three Musketeers” to “The Loves of Pharaoh”, and in 1934, together with Dmitry Babichenko, he made the poster for “Jolly Fellows”. He graduated in 1928 and went to work at the Mezhrabpomfilm studio. In 1931, together with Lev Atamanov, he directed “Athwart Street”, the first original Soviet animated sound film. With Atamanov and Babichenko he invented a series character, Klyaksa (the Blot). In 1935 he moved to Viktor Smirnov’s group, where he was listed as a titles artist, though in practice he did directing work as well.

From 1936 he worked at Soyuzmultfilm. The pre-war years brought “Kolobok” and “The Brave Sailor” (1936), “A Noisy Voyage” (1937), “Why the Rhinoceros Has Folds in Its Skin” (1938), “Uncle Styopa” (1939) and “We’re Off to the Olympiad Too” (1940). He completed “Clatterfly”, after Chukovsky, in 1941, just before leaving for the front; the film survives without its original soundtrack.

First, though, he managed to make several training films at the Voentekhfilm studio, about enemy tanks and finding one’s way across country. Then he fought with the 159th Rifle Division on the Southwestern Front, was caught in an encirclement in September 1941 and was freed only in March 1942. As a lieutenant he went through the war to its last day and took part in the Belorussian operation.

After the war he returned to Soyuzmultfilm, from 1947 taught on the studio’s courses for animators and worked on colour film; “The Merry Kitchen Garden” came out at this time. In 1948 Suteev unexpectedly left the studio without finishing “The Hunting Rifle” (the film was completed by Panteleimon Sazonov). His family and colleagues put this departure down to his unrequited feelings for the animator Tatiana Taranovich, who had joined the studio in 1946; hundreds of his letters to her survive. From then on he worked for animation mainly as a screenwriter. Of his roughly forty scripts nearly all were filmed: “When the New Year Trees Are Lit” (1950), “The Magic Store” (1953), “What Kind of a Bird Is This?” (1955), “Petya and Little Red Riding Hood” (1958), “Who Said ‘Meow’?” (1962), “The Bag of Apples” (1974), “Petya the Cockerel Is Missing” (1985). Some of these films won international prizes.

Books became his second profession. From 1947 Suteev worked with Detgiz and illustrated Chukovsky, Marshak, Mikhalkov and Berestov. With his drawings the following appeared in Russian for the first time: Gianni Rodari’s “The Adventures of Cipollino” (Suteev’s characters became the model for toys), the Norwegian Alf Prøysen’s “Happy New Year”, the Hungarian Ágnes Bálint’s “Gnome Gnomych and Raisin”, and Lilian Moore’s “Little Raccoon and the Thing in the Pool”; “Pif” he retold from the French. His own “tales in pictures”, “Under the Mushroom”, “The Chick and the Duckling”, “The Helpful Stick”, “Who Said Meow”, “The Bag of Apples”, he built so that almost every sentence received a drawing, and the drawings, lively and frame-like, carried what he had learned in animation. It seems to me that a Suteev book is laid out like a storyboard, which is why so many of them later turned so easily into films. They have been translated into dozens of languages, and his pictures are still used to decorate kindergartens, children’s clinics and shops.

In 1965 he was named an Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR. In 1983, by then a widower, Suteev married Tatiana Taranovich. He died on 10 March 1993 in Moscow and was buried in the Nikolskoye Cemetery in Balashikha, outside Moscow.