Le Hérisson dans le brouillard du texte au film, ou l’amplification interprétative

This article examines the relationship between the story The Hedgehog in the Fog, written by Sergei Kozlov, and the animated film by the director Yuri Norstein, adapted from Kozlov’s story, based on a script by the author and illustrated by Francesca Yarboussova. This film distinguishes itself radically from the other adaptations of Kozlov stories by its atmosphere, its poeticism, and the message it carries. The film increases the dramatic tension of the story by purely cinematic means (sound, color, rhythm, framing), diversifying its different aspects by mixing them with other stories, and by expanding the symbolic meaning of the narrative and giving it a sacral and mystical dimension. By doing this, Norstein expands one interpretive potential of the text: although the series of stories of the hedgehog and his friends constitute a universe from which evil is nearly absent, anxiety, fear, and existential doubt are perceptible, in a filigree pattern, almost as an echo in the text. Norstein’s cinematic adaptation is thus the result of what might be called an “interpretative amplification”.