Classical music and animation make natural companions, as Walt Disney proved with Fantasia; any wordless music tends to encourage images to form in listeners' minds, and animation is a flexible and mobile medium that can put concrete form to those images, regardless of how outlandish, abstract, or disjointed they are. Like many others before him, commercial artist and animator R.O. Blechman took full advantage of that pairing for his own unique project: His 51-minute, Emmy-winning 1984 animated piece The Soldier's Tale flexes its visual styles to match the changing musical styles of L'Histoire Du Soldat, a famous 1918 experimental piece by composer Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky's score incorporates elements of jazz, tango, waltz, and ragtime, as well as narration and more conventional classical music, and Blechman responds by handing different parts of the piece to different key animators, who give each section a slightly different visual tone. They mostly stick to his familiar (to New Yorker readers, at least) shaky-lined character design, but some segments veer into abstract and Cubist images, making the more concrete moments solider by comparison. The piece tells a traditional and tragic Russian fairy tale, about a soldier returning home to marry his sweetheart; on the road, he meets the Devil (voiced by Max von Sydow), who symbolically attempts to buy the soldier's most prized possession, a battered violin, in exchange for wealth, success, and knowledge of the future. The soldier gives in, to his eventual deep regret, but later manages to wrest his soul back from the devil—at least temporarily. The animation is simple and occasionally repetitive, but it's lively and it beautifully matches both Stravinsky's protean music and the emotional story it lays out. Animators who try to bring music to life don't always get it right, as Disney proved with Fantasia 2000. But Blechman's simplicity and flexibility put the focus on Stravinsky's music, illustrating it rather than overwhelming it.
Koch Lorber's DVD release comes packed with extras. The Blechman-and-company commentary track is deeply flawed; the participants sound like they're phoning it in from different planets, and they're all mixed too low compared to the actual movie soundtrack. But the extensive collection of Blechman works, from his television commercials to various short pieces to his magazine covers and newspaper illustrations, contain an abundance of expressive gems. Blechman novices should find A Soldier's Tale a worthy primer, as well as a charming classic.