"The Old Man & the Sea", brilliant animated oil pa...

Alexander Petrov - Russian artist/animator. The film is made entirely in pastel oil paintings on glass, a technique mastered by only a handful of animators in the world. By using his fingertips instead of a paintbrush on different glass sheets positioned on multiple levels, each covered with slow-drying oil paints, he was able to add depth to his paintings. After photographing each frame painted on the glass sheets, which was four times larger than the usual A4-sized canvas, he had to slightly modify the painting for the next frame and so on. It took Aleksandr Petrov over two years, from March 1997 through April 1999, to paint each of the 29,000+ frames. "The Old Man and the Sea", for which Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, was written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It centers upon an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Great story for your kids, too.