The Old Man and the Sea (1999 film)

Based on Wikipedia: The Old Man and the Sea (1999 film)

Painting Dreams with Fingertips

Imagine creating a film by painting twenty-nine thousand pictures with your bare fingers. Each image exists only briefly on a sheet of glass before being photographed and then smeared into the next frame. One wrong stroke, and days of work vanish. This is how Aleksandr Petrov spent two and a half years of his life, hunched over glass plates in a Montreal studio, bringing Ernest Hemingway's most famous novella to shimmering, dreamlike life.

The result, released in 1999, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. But calling it simply "animation" feels inadequate. What Petrov created is closer to a moving painting, each frame an oil work that would hold its own on a gallery wall.

The Technique: Oil Paint on Glass

Most animation works through a straightforward, if tedious, process. You draw a picture, photograph it, draw another picture that's slightly different, photograph that, and repeat thousands of times. When played in sequence, the static images create the illusion of movement. This is true whether you're drawing by hand, manipulating puppets, or rendering on a computer.

Petrov's method is fundamentally different.

He works with slow-drying oil paints spread across large glass sheets, each positioned on different levels like transparent layers in a sophisticated sandwich. Using both brushes and his own fingertips, he creates an image, then photographs it with a specialized camera. But here's what makes the technique so precarious: rather than starting fresh for the next frame, he must modify the existing wet paint to create the next moment in time.

Think about what this means. There's no "undo" button. There's no going back to check your work. Each frame destroys the previous one in the act of creating the next. If you smudge too much paint, or move a character's arm in the wrong direction, you cannot simply erase and try again. The glass becomes a palimpsest of every decision you've made, carrying forward the accumulated evidence of thousands of small choices.

The technique requires paint that dries slowly enough to remain workable for hours, but not so slowly that it smears uncontrollably. It demands a mental model of the entire scene across multiple transparent layers, each moving independently. And it asks the animator to work backwards in some ways, since elements in the background must be painted first on the lowest glass sheets.

Only a handful of animators in the world have mastered this approach. Petrov learned it from his mentor, but he has pushed it further than anyone, using canvases four times larger than typical and building custom camera systems to capture the detail.

The Story: An Old Man and His Marlin

Hemingway's novella, published in 1952, tells a superficially simple story. Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. He is considered unlucky, so unlucky that the parents of his young apprentice, Manolin, have forbidden their son from fishing with him. The boy still visits Santiago each morning out of love and respect, but he must sail with more successful boats.

On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago ventures far out into the Gulf Stream alone. He hooks something massive, a marlin so large that it begins towing his small skiff rather than submitting to be caught. What follows is an extended battle of wills lasting several days, during which the old man holds the line with his own body, eating raw fish to maintain his strength, speaking aloud to himself and to the marlin he has come to respect.

When Santiago finally kills the great fish and straps it to the side of his boat, sharks begin to gather. Drawn by the blood in the water, they attack the marlin. Santiago fights them off with his harpoon, then with a knife lashed to an oar, then with a club, then with the tiller of his boat. But there are too many. By the time he reaches shore, only the skeleton remains.

The novella won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize and helped secure his Nobel Prize in Literature two years later. It has been read as an allegory of artistic creation, of man's struggle against nature, of dignity in defeat. Hemingway himself resisted symbolic interpretation, saying he had tried to make "a real old man, a real sea, a real fish, and real sharks." Whatever it means, the story carries an emotional weight that has resonated with readers for over seventy years.

Translating Words to Paint

Petrov's film follows Hemingway's plot faithfully, but the medium allows him to visualize what the prose can only suggest. When Santiago dreams, we see his dreams. Not as flashbacks with clear boundaries, but as paint dissolving into paint, reality bleeding into memory and back again.

In one remarkable sequence, Santiago imagines that he and the marlin are brothers, swimming together through an ocean that merges with the sky. Man and fish glide through currents of color that could be water or air or something beyond either. This is pure cinema, impossible to achieve in any other medium. Live action could never capture it. Traditional animation would render it too literally. Computer graphics would make it too precise. Only Petrov's technique, with its soft edges and luminous textures, can show us what it feels like to dream while gripping a fishing line for the third day straight.

The film also captures something essential about the light in Hemingway's world. Cuba sits in the tropics, where sunlight falls almost vertically and reflects off the water with blinding intensity. Petrov's oil paints glow with this light. The sky at dawn bleeds from deep blue to gold. The sea shifts from green to purple to silver as clouds pass overhead. The marlin, when it finally breaks the surface, gleams like something from another world.

The Making: Montreal, Moscow, and Tokyo

Petrov had made three acclaimed films in Russia before this project, all using his paint-on-glass technique. "The Cow" in 1989, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" in 1992, and "Mermaid" in 1996 had established him as a master of the form. But those films were modest in scale, limited by the resources available in post-Soviet Russia.

In 1995, Petrov met with representatives from Pascal Blais Studio, a Canadian animation company based in Montreal. They proposed something ambitious: a paint-on-glass film shot in IMAX format, the giant-screen system typically used for nature documentaries and spectacle films. No one had ever attempted animation on this scale.

IMAX uses film frames roughly ten times larger than standard 35mm. Every brushstroke would be visible on screens six stories tall. The level of detail required would be crushing. But the payoff would be immersive in a way animation had never achieved.

The project required funding from three countries. Pascal Blais Studio provided the facilities and Canadian support. Japanese companies including NHK, the national broadcaster, contributed significant financing. And Panorama Studio in Yaroslavl, Russia, Petrov's own company, brought his expertise and vision.

Work began in March 1997. Petrov worked alongside his son Dmitri, who assisted with the painting. They built a custom camera system, mounting an IMAX camera on what was probably the most precise computerized animation stand ever constructed. A video-assist camera attached to the IMAX allowed them to preview each frame before committing it to the expensive large-format film.

Twenty-five months later, in April 1999, they had their twenty-nine thousand frames.

The Sound of the Sea

The film was released simultaneously with French and English soundtracks, a necessity given its Canadian and international funding. Gordon Pinsent, a legendary Canadian actor, provided the voice of Santiago in English. His weathered voice perfectly matched Petrov's aged fisherman, speaking the internal monologue that Hemingway gave his protagonist.

But much of the film plays without dialogue. The sound design captures wind, waves, the creak of the boat, the sudden violence of a shark attack. Petrov's images are so richly textured that they almost create their own sounds. You can nearly hear the paint moving.

Recognition and Legacy

The film premiered at IMAX theaters, where it was often shown alongside a short documentary about Hemingway. Audiences accustomed to nature films and action spectacles found themselves watching a twenty-minute art film, paint dissolving and reforming before their eyes on a screen the size of a building.

It won everywhere. The Academy Award was the highest-profile honor, but Petrov also took prizes at Annecy, the world's most prestigious animation festival; at the Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films; at the Japan Media Arts Festival; and at competitions from Montreal to Saint Petersburg. The film was nominated for a BAFTA and a Genie, Canada's national film award.

These awards recognized something beyond technical virtuosity. Petrov had found a way to honor Hemingway's spare prose while creating something entirely new. The film is not an illustration of the novella. It is a translation, faithful to the spirit while speaking a different language entirely.

The Persistence of Paint

In an era when digital animation dominates, Petrov's technique can seem almost perversely difficult. Why paint on glass when a computer could generate similar effects in a fraction of the time? Why work with materials that resist your control when software offers infinite precision and endless revision?

The answer is visible in every frame. There is a quality to oil paint, a luminosity and depth, that cannot be replicated digitally. Light passes through the pigment and reflects back in complex ways. Colors blend at their edges in chemical reactions that no algorithm fully captures. The imperfections, the slight wobbles between frames, the visible brushwork, all of this creates a texture that reads as handmade, as human.

This matters for Hemingway's story. Santiago is a craftsman, a man who knows exactly how to set a line and read the water and play a fish. His tragedy is partly the tragedy of craft itself, of skills that no longer matter in a mechanized world. Petrov's technique embodies this same devotion to doing things the hard way, the right way, the way that requires a lifetime to master.

The film also demonstrates something about the relationship between effort and meaning. We value things partly in proportion to the difficulty of making them. A story told through twenty-nine thousand hand-painted frames carries a different weight than one rendered by a computer. We can feel the years of labor in every moment.

Where to Find It

The film exists on two DVD releases, one in English and one in French, with significantly different contents despite similar covers. The English version includes both language soundtracks plus a documentary about Hemingway. The French version includes only French audio but adds Petrov's three previous films with French subtitles, plus a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of "The Old Man and the Sea."

Finding the film in its intended IMAX format is now essentially impossible. The giant-screen prints have long since been retired, and the specialized projectors required are increasingly rare. But even on a small screen, the quality of Petrov's painting comes through. Each frame rewards close attention.

Petrov has made only one film since, "The Winter Days" in 2003, a collaborative project with Japanese animators. He continues to teach and to oversee Panorama Studio. The paint-on-glass technique remains as rare and demanding as ever, kept alive by a tiny community of practitioners around the world.

Perhaps that's appropriate. Hemingway's Santiago was one of the last of his kind, an old man clinging to methods that the world had passed by. Petrov is something similar, a master of a craft that makes no economic sense, that cannot be scaled or accelerated or outsourced. Both men went far out, past where the tourist boats venture, and brought back something extraordinary.