Andrey Khrzhanovsky

Andrey Yurievich Khrzhanovsky (Russian: Андрей Юрьевич Хржано́вский; born 30 November 1939, Moscow) is a Russian animator, documaker, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer. He is the father of director Ilya Khrzhanovsky (1975). His parents met in Irkutsk, and after the revolution they moved to Leningrad after mother's brothers. There, his father, who performed in the divertissement genre, became close to the actor Erast Garin and his wife Hesya Lokshina, who, after moving to Moscow, made every effort to make the Khrzhanovsky family follow them. They settled in Mansurovsky lane, and a year later the couple had a son, Andrey. In 1962, he graduated from "VGIK" (workshop of Lev Kuleshov and Alexandra Khokhlova). According to Hrzhanovsky, he was brought to "Soyuzmultfilm" by a case: due to the large number of graduates of the directing faculty, the only way to make a diploma film without spending years waiting for their turn was to shoot non-fiction films at the studio. The cartoon "There Lived Kozyavin" (1966) was not allowed to be defended because of suspicions of surrealism until the head of the Department Sergey Gerasimov defined it as "our, socialist surrealism". Khrzhanovsky describes his next cartoon, "The Glass Harmonica" (1968), as "the story of today... about the power of money over our souls, about a culture that is silenced". The film was handed over to the management on the day when the Soviet troops entered Prague. As a result, he was put "on the shelf", and the dir…