Ivan Maximov, “Provincial School” (1992)
Amusing little animated short, running at under five minutes, about a most unusual country school where the kids resemble foetuses of unknown species of human and animal at different stages of development and Teacher is an elephantine being who communicates in low rumbles and spits out an arithmetic problem to be solved. A most freaky school indeed where everyone defies the rules of gravity and the answer to the arithmetic problem zings all over the grey school corridors and ends up in a different classroom as the wrong answer to another arithmetic problem – a school many kids would like to attend if the teachers didn’t look like ponderous pachyderms!
The style of animation is original; the backgrounds look three-dimensional and realistic though in a dreamy sort of way and the appearances of the cheeky pupils reflect their mischievous nature and in no way attempt to delineate them realistically. Bodies slither over the desks, a child wraps his head in giant ears or similar appendages, one kid withdraws his eyes and ears into his body and ends up a weirdly phallic worm, two girls who are doppelgangers smirk secretly at each other and one blows her bubblegum over the other but most kids are like little worms with over-sized heads reminiscent of the drawings primary school children might do.
The film crackles with creative possibility as the kids stretch themselves with super-plasticine ability. There’s no plot to speak of, just a snapshot of a day in the life of a school attended by descendants of those alien beings who crash-landed their meteor-like spaceship somewhere in central Siberia in 1908. Sometimes when you set out to create something with no story in mind, no message to deliver, no theme to refer to, but you just have a visual idea and some characters to play around with, you find a tale comes to you and tells itself and that’s how “Provincial School” seems to have panned out. The kids defeat the teacher in the end!