Fyodor Khitruk(1917-2012)

Fyodor Khitruk is Soviet and Russian animator, director, screenwriter, teacher, translator. People's Artist of the USSR (1987). Fyodor was born in Tver, the family moved to Moscow in 1924 and in 1931 to Stuttgart, Germany where the future animator was engaged in an art and craft school. In 1936, already in Moscow, the young man studied at the art college of OGIZ; later studied at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Graphic Artists. After watching the cartoons of W. Disney at the First Moscow International Film Festival (1935), he became interested in animation and, on the advice of a friend of the artist, decided to enter the Soyuzmultfilm studio, but was refused for a long time. In 1937, Fyodor Khitruk began working as a trainee animator, and since 1938 - as an animator at the Soyuzmultfilm studio. In August 1941, after the start of the Great Patriotic War, he was sent to study at the Institute of Foreign Languages for six months. After training, Fyodor served as a translator at the headquarters of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, commanded a platoon of radio interception of the 17th Air Army. After the war, Fyodor Khitruk was a military translator in Berlin for two years, and then returned to Soyuzmultfilm. Since 1962, he became engaged in directing. His first film The Story of One Crime (1962) was a great success. Today, the film is considered the beginning of a new style in the Soviet animation. Khitruk - director of short animated films for in different genres. The most famous satire on the bureaucracy is The Man in the Frame (1966), the parable about the loneliness of man in modern society Ostrov (1973), the parody Film, Film, Film (1968), the parable The Lion and the Bull (1984). The author of three animated films about Winnie the Pooh. Khitruk was one of the compilers of the international vocabulary of terms on animation.