{"id":66785,"date":"2026-08-12T16:07:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T15:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=66785"},"modified":"2026-08-12T16:07:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T15:07:59","slug":"anna-ester-volozh-you-can-teach-a-thought-some-manners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/anna-ester-volozh-you-can-teach-a-thought-some-manners\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna-Ester Volozh: \u201cYou Can Teach a Thought Some Manners\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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How did you get into animation?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a child, I studied mathematics. At twenty-one, I graduated from HSE with a bachelor\u2019s degree in economics, and in my final years there I also worked part-time at an investment fund. And in principle, it felt fine \u2014 you know, you could perfectly well live like that. But I wanted something completely different, something more creative. And I had loved animation since childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once, in the second grade, we had a programming class. I finished all the tasks before everyone else, and the teacher needed to find something for me to do. So he showed me Flash. I was amazed by the fact that you could make a film yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so after HSE, in 2012, I started thinking about where to go next. At the time, it was completely unclear how you could get into animation without going through VGIK. Now there are lots of animation schools and courses in Russia, but back then there weren\u2019t. In England, though, studying animation was perfectly possible, and I had long dreamed of living in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was accepted into six schools and chose the one in Bournemouth because I had always wanted to live by the sea. A British master\u2019s degree feels rather unusual after a Russian university \u2014 we only had classes once a week. After a Russian bachelor\u2019s programme, where you go to classes almost like school lessons, it was strange, but on the other hand I suddenly had a lot of free time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the academic year, we had to submit our final project, and I don\u2019t particularly like writing academic papers \u2014 especially since the culture of academic writing in England is a very particular world of its own. Now I understand how it works, but back then\u2026 Anyway, I went to my supervisor and said, \u201cHow about I don\u2019t write anything for you and just make two films instead?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was surprised: \u201cIn a year?! All right!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, I had no idea that making two films in one year was actually a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After my master\u2019s, I worked as a freelancer for a couple of years, then some friends and I founded a studio. Eight years later, there had become so much paperwork that I went back to freelancing. In essence, it doesn\u2019t change very much about the work itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s talk about that work, then. You finish a film, part ways with it\u2026 Do you simply close that door and move on to the next one?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

More or less. But actually, all of my films are connected by the same theme: similar thoughts are interpreted through an individual artistic language. I hope that in the future I\u2019ll be able to move on to other questions as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As a viewer, I find it impossible to compare Johanne and The Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess \u2014 they seem completely different!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Possibly. After all, there are seven years between them, and I\u2019m a completely different person now. On the other hand, both films are about the relationship between a girl and society, and about what she owes it and what she doesn\u2019t. Johanne owes society everything, including her own life, while the Proud Princess has the right to destroy the world \u2014 and die herself. It\u2019s the same thought seen from different points of view. It isn\u2019t deliberate \u2014 I just think about roughly the same things all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject of women in contemporary society?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only contemporary society. And not only women. The girl is more of a symbol of the soul here, so these are stories about the relationship between the soul and civilisation. What can you sacrifice, and what should you not sacrifice? How far can you go? In the first film, the heroine sacrifices herself for love. In the second, she does exactly the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When you submit a film to a festival, is it simply a routine part of the profession? Or do you still feel anxious and wait for the result \u2014 do you have expectations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both. But the more I do this, the more I realise that I\u2019m doing many things wrong. Do you remember last year\u2019s scandal in the festival industry involving Konstantin Bronzit, when he submitted his film under a pseudonym and changed its country of origin? Festivals were deeply offended by that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the festival industry is an ecosystem. It consists of people, with their feelings and values. Of course, a film needs to possess certain objective qualities, but this is still art, and you have to understand that subjective qualities are involved as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, at one point someone who works for Vimeo Staff Pick contacted me and asked for permission to include my film in the selection. I was delighted, but his colleagues disagreed with his choice. You always have to remember that people will have opinions, and those opinions don\u2019t necessarily say anything about the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you don\u2019t necessarily have to let that hurt you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, absolutely not! Once you\u2019ve accumulated three hundred festival rejections, you get used to it. It also matters what kind of programme a festival is putting together that particular year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, I submitted Johanne to the British Animation Film Festival in 2017, and it was selected. In 2024, The Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess wasn\u2019t selected \u2014 and then a year later, the very same film was accepted into the programme of the very same festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That doesn\u2019t tell you anything about the film. It tells you about the curator\u2019s task and their responsibility towards the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An animator sits in their bubble and works. Then they release the result \u2014 the film \u2014 into the outside world. Do you remember the first time that happened to you? Was it frightening?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course! When you\u2019re inside a team working on something, everything feels very private. I didn\u2019t think at all about the fact that someone would actually watch it. I imagined some abstract viewer whom I would never meet in person, not a room full of actual living people. I couldn\u2019t even imagine being in the same room as people watching my film. So I wasn\u2019t embarrassed. I put into the film whatever I wanted to put there and didn\u2019t think that someone might find it ridiculous or funny. I made sincere artistic choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there was a screening for students in Bournemouth. It was genuinely very difficult for me to be in that room. I felt\u2026 naked. Really, it\u2019s as though you were a painter and used yourself as the nude model. And then you exhibit the work \u2014 and realise that the audience will see you. Even now, I still leave the room if I show someone one of my films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And at festivals, do you also try to leave the auditorium?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Either I leave, or I sit very quietly. For example, I feel shy about the festival tradition of Q&As, and that is one of my mistakes, but so far I haven\u2019t managed to correct it. A one-to-one interview is fine, but when there are another hundred people in front of you\u2026 Of course, it is extraordinarily beautiful to see your film on a big screen. But you don\u2019t expect to enter into such immediate intimacy with so many people. I think it\u2019s a skill, but I don\u2019t have it yet. I even showed the film to my wife separately, even though I made it partly for her, as a gift. I put it on and left the room. We talked about the film afterwards, of course, but while someone is actually watching it, I can\u2019t be next to the viewer, even if that viewer is someone very close to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When you begin a film, do you look at what is happening around you? Do you try to adjust the film to the mood or nerve of the times?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generally speaking, I don\u2019t read the news very much. Usually I don\u2019t even know what the discourse is, unless something particularly striking happens and reaches me somehow. And that is another one of my festival mistakes \u2014 of course, I should be more engaged. You have to take contemporary realities into account and show a certain degree of sensitivity so that you don\u2019t offend anyone, because society fifteen years ago and society today are completely different worlds. If a thought were a stream and society were the landscape, then the stream has to go around this mountain, avoid that stone, and not flow over there at all; forcing its way straight through would be strange too. But overall, I can\u2019t influence the thought of the film itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you can\u2019t force it into a Procrustean bed?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. But you can teach a thought some manners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your films have very striking soundtracks!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are an extremely important part of the films. I was around thirteen or fourteen when, as a hobby, I started making video edits set to music, so from quite a young age I understood how much music can add to images. The two should complement each other rather than duplicate one another. Music can tell you something that an image cannot. I\u2019ve worked with the same composer since my very first film \u2014 Ros Gilman. I\u2019m not a music specialist, I don\u2019t have the professional vocabulary, and I don\u2019t know how to explain a task precisely, so I work intuitively. Right now I\u2019m planning another short film, and the moment the plot appeared in my imagination, the music appeared a millisecond later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On your website, you make a particular point of saying that you don\u2019t use AI in your films. Why is that important to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It simply isn\u2019t my path. Since neural networks entered the world, many people have felt inspired for the first time in a very long time \u2014 and I don\u2019t want to diminish that experience! But personally, I constantly feel that AI produces something generic, some kind of arithmetic mean of the works of other artists and writers. Neural networks have an enormous number of possible applications, but they have nothing to do with my films. Also, I think that in art, the very process of solving problems is incredibly valuable. That is the most interesting part, and I wouldn\u2019t want to delegate the interesting part to someone \u2014 or something \u2014 else. It seems that if you don\u2019t look too closely at something made by AI and something made by a living artist, you might not notice the difference. But if you try to feel it, the difference is obvious. It\u2019s like an ichthyosaur and a dolphin: they look similar, but an ichthyosaur is a marine reptile, while a dolphin is a mammal, a cetacean. It isn\u2019t that one of them is worse and the other is better. They are simply completely different creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your films are very beautiful. What is beauty to you, and how important is it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very important! Beauty comes in different forms, and you have to grow into being able to appreciate many kinds of it. When I was a child, the animated film The Caliph Stork, directed by Valery Ugarov, seemed terrifying to me. As I grew older, I realised that it was terrifying precisely because it was so beautiful. Or The Nutcracker by Boris Stepantsev \u2014 that frightened me too, and it is also incredibly beautiful. Many things can seem beautiful at one moment and horrifying at another, depending on your state of mind. There\u2019s a contemporary art gallery near my house, and sometimes I walk past it and think, \u201cWho on earth would want that in their home? How awful!\u201d And sometimes I look at it and realise that it is endlessly beautiful. Beauty, I think, is always connected to nature and plays with harmony. It is either harmonious or deliberately disharmonious, like avant-garde music \u2014 there isn\u2019t a single unnecessary note in it. Part of my problem with AI lies there as well: it doesn\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d what harmony is. Yes, you can train it on a large number of harmonious works, and then it will more or less guess at harmony. But \u201cmore or less\u201d isn\u2019t enough \u2014 you need precision, otherwise a person immediately feels the falseness. That play with harmony is what art is to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Is London a harmonious city?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s difficult to say. It depends which parts of London you mean. It\u2019s so large and so varied! There are dusty six-lane roads, and I find it difficult to see harmony in them. But I know there are people who, for example, like the City. I can understand that: those skyscrapers are associated with polish, with financial prosperity \u2014 a kind of crystal. But I want something organic. The more plants, the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What shaped you as an artist?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books, without question. All of Oscar Wilde \u2014 partly because of him, perhaps, I wanted to come to England. I read all of his works in Russian. They are so beautiful \u2014 the Soviet school of translation really was extraordinary. But the records of his trial or the autobiography of his lover haven\u2019t been translated, so I read those in the original. Tolkien, of course. At one point I read everything by Lewis that I could find \u2014 Narnia and everything else. Then there were Austen, the Bront\u00ebs, Dickens, and many others. But animated films were the backbone. I love The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, directed by Isao Takahata; the classic 1980s film The Last Unicorn, directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin; and another film from roughly the same period, the abstract Angel\u2019s Egg, directed by Mamoru Oshii. I spend all my free time watching new shorts and pilots. About ten years ago, I was watching yet another film and thought: if you have access to films like these, you can live in almost any circumstances. I simply adore animation \u2014 this medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Early Concept Johanne<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What makes animation different from other artistic languages?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand the emotions of an animated character much better than those of a live human being. I love live-action cinema, but animation feels more real to me. It exists in the realm of some kind of primordial reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is animation the only area of your professional interest?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. At the moment, I\u2019m working on a fantasy graphic novel for middle-grade children. Originally, we were planning to make it as an animated film, but it would be feature-length, and feature films require very serious amounts of money. So we decided to release the story without that kind of enormous financial investment \u2014 perhaps twenty times less, and that is something I can manage. We already have the character designs, I\u2019m finishing the script for the storyboard, and the artist will start working at the end of September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fantasy is very popular among teenagers today, by the way. Why do you think that is?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Possibly because it\u2019s quite difficult to create a realistic story for teenagers today that feels believable on the one hand, while still allowing something to actually happen on the other. There is such a lack of freedom in children\u2019s lives now! Usually they have very little free time, and very little time when they aren\u2019t being supervised by adults. A child is almost always under someone\u2019s supervision. It\u2019s very difficult to get yourself into an adventure when somebody is watching you all the time! Fantasy, on the other hand, gives you characters of an age that teenagers recognise and understand, but those characters have complete freedom \u2014 the freedom to run, to fly, and to make mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo from the archive of Anna-Ester Volozh<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the British Animation Film Festival, we had already encountered the world of Anna-Ester Volozh \u2014 her The Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess was one of those works that continue to live in the viewer\u2019s memory after the closing credits. Who is behind this unsettling and remarkably beautiful fairy-tale universe? We spoke with London-based animation director and producer Anna-Ester Volozh about why animation can feel more real than live-action cinema, why art needs precision and harmony \u2014 and why sometimes it is easier for an artist to leave the room than to watch their own film together with an audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":66786,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,84],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[185],"class_list":["post-66785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-people","column-letters-from-the-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66797,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66785\/revisions\/66797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66785"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=66785"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=66785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}