Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Animated Not Once, But Twice

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in an inspired eight weeks in 1951. It wasn’t a long novel, running just a little more than 100 pages. But it carried more than its weight. The novel, Hemingway’s last major work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. It contributed to Hemingway receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. And it soon entered the American literary canon and became a staple in classrooms across the United States and beyond.

A good 60 years later, the novella still captures our imagination. Just this week, a German artist Marcel Schindler released “ein Stop-Motion-Film” inspired by The Old Man and the Sea. The animation bears some similarity to the artful videos released by RSA during the past two years, and perhaps somewhat appropriately it’s all set to the tune “Sail” by AWOLNATION. It works if you’re being literal about things.

Of course, you can’t talk about animating The Old Man and the Sea without referring back to Aleksandr Petrov’s 1999 masterpiece that won the Academy Award for Short Film. To make the film, Petrov and his son spent two years painting pastel oils on a total of 29,000 sheets of glass. Below, you can see how the 20 minute film (added to our Free Movies collection) turned out.


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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.