Animated films

The Master and Margarita - 2017

Maria Morris

With her video animation of The Master and Margarita, Maria Morris of the London Kingston University won the 3rd prize at the Kingston Animation Prize competition.

The Kingston Animation Prize is an annual competition sponsored by Vintage Classic Books, a division of the publishing house Penguin Random, and run with final year students on the animation course of the Kingston University in London. Each year, the students are invited to script and create short animated films based on a book selected by Vintage.

As part of the campaign for Vintage's Classics Russians series, consisting of the reissuing of a set of 6 Russian classic books in 2017, the students were asked to come up with a short film for works by Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov and Vasily Grossman. The publication of the set coincides with the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The first prize was awarded to director Flora Caulton and her team’s animation for Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The second prize went to Katy Wang and her team for their animation for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

The third prize went to Maria Morris and her team for their treatment of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Other members of the team were Billy Huntingdon as the production designer, Luca Bowles for the sound and Denisa Costin for the special effects. As a producer, Elena Struleva was in charge of the animation.