The Music to Valentin Kataev’s Fairy Tale The Wishing Seven-Colored Flower in the Space of Russia’s and China’s Screen Culture

Abstract

The present article focuses on music in the space of screen culture. It discusses the interpretation of Valentin Kataev’s fairy tale The Wishing Seven-Colored Flower [Tsvetik-Semitsvetik] that was presented in the following artistic projects: a) the short television film The Wishing Seven-Colored Flower, created in the late 1960s through the collaboration of composer Evgeny Krylatov, directors Garnik Arazyan and Boris Bushmelev; b) the animated film with the same title by Russian and Soviet director Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Soviet composer Yuri Levitin (released in 1948); c) the animated film by Chinese director Cao Xiaohui and Chinese composer Lu Shiling (1974), whose title retains also a similarity to the original source title. In regard to Krylatov’s and his colleagues’ film, addressed to a children’s audience, analyzing the interaction between the musical component of the film text, the video sequence, and the verbal-plot sequence clearly reveals Krylatov brilliant talent, his professionalism in the field of orchestral style and symphonic dramaturgy, as well as the organic synthesis of his inherent modern thinking — one that is recognizable by his composition techniques, as well as the traditions of the Russian musical classics. In a similar way, Yuri Levitin’s music carries out a dramaturgical function when accompanying animate films, while demonstrating elements of contemporary compositional means (namely, the aleatory technique). Modern compositional techniques also appear in Lu Shiling’s music, making themselves present in the texture of clusters as the main elements of sonorical sound. However, in contrast to the work of his Russian colleagues, the latter’s music carries out a purely illustrative function in the animated film.