I was sitting in the room, looking through the window. I was thinking, where does the sky begin?
Suddenly, a bird flew away from the rowan branch, and I saw the sky begun from its wing's wave.
Evening came, all birds are asleep, first stars appeared…
And the sky ended with the last ray of the most distant star…

- ‘The Sky Has No Edge’ by Invisible Friends

How often do you, in the unrelenting rush of the times we live in, pause and wonder? Perhaps about the sky, its countless dispositions from blues to reds and everything in between, its daunting vastness or its elusive edges. Or even about the ‘little’ things, the insignificant minutia of the mundane that reveals its subtle beauty if one cares to look. One story settles beside another in a string that meanders through our lives in silence; worlds reside within worlds, they intersect, collide and run parallelly in tandem in a giant labyrinth of stories—some lived, some thought and others just unravelling.

Invisible Friends, an international community of independent animators, artists, film directors and sound artists, thrives on these stories. Their animated short films, music videos and graphic design projects breathe life into imaginations, memories, poetry, history and more through diverse materials and techniques, stop-motion animation being their forte. For the animators, visual arts are vehicles for exploring the world and human nature; their work becomes a documentation of these journeys. The vein of discovery and contemplation evident in the collective’s oeuvre also permeated our hour-long conversation with Yura Boguslavsky, animation director and co-founder of Invisible Friends, where he spoke about the collective’s ethos, operations and aspirations. “Usually, our methods are very intuitive and not rational; our films explore the boundaries of life and death, feminist stories, or simple things such as being a human,” Boguslavsky says. “Most of our films are poetic and have a lyrical sense to them,” he adds.

The collective came into being 15 years ago when Boguslavsky was an animation student in Moscow. What began as several friends with a shared love for animation making short films together soon evolved into a studio space harbouring their creative experiments with stop-motion animation. After almost a year of brainstorming, the collective was labelled Invisible Friends—a nod to animators’ quiet, frequently overlooked presence behind the screens and the friendship and warmth they extend to the audience in the form of films and entertainment. In conjunction with producing new visual narratives, teaching is intrinsic to Invisible Friends’ body of work. The team carries out a variety of educational programmes and workshops across several countries and in their manual animation school in Yerevan, Armenia. 

Tracing the inspirations that define Invisible Friends’ creative semantics, Boguslavsky tells STIR, “I think we are following some traditions of Russian animation because we all were raised on these films; they are beautiful, interesting, experimental films that were made during the 20th century in Russia." But influences arrive from multifarious channels—cultural tapestries, abstractions of life, historical accounts and so forth. While a facet of their practice is rooted in traditions, there is another that aspires to break conventions through experimentation. In their stop-motion films, the animators employ a variety of techniques—often in response to the theme—achieved in an array of materials. 

The Sky Has No Edge (2022), a poetic film about the sky created by a group of students and curators in a summer residency in Tarusa, a town in Russia, is a rare example of mosaic animation. In Stolen Melody (2022), the team forgoes the traditional approach for an etude method utilised commonly in theatre. Puppet and cut-out animation techniques and materials such as plasticine and clay are also recurring in the studio’s creations. “I like to make every film like I am making it [for] the first time. I usually change materials and learn something new depending on the topic and the genre,” Boguslavsky explains in an exclusive video conversation.

Despite a significant number of voices contributing to the filmmaking process in a collective, Boguslavsky expresses how maintaining a ‘horizontal structure’ is of utmost importance to the team. “All of us are friends and we don't want one to be more important than another. Usually, we want to work together, not just to have workers, but to have collaborators,” he explains. This intent is also reflected in their teaching—a deliberate subversion of educational systems the animators were exposed to themselves. Once a film is ideated and set in motion, the collective invites people—usually the ones who have studied in their school—to participate in different tasks—scripts, animations and sound design. Quite often, the films originate from educational processes and workshops the team hosts. Sometimes a film is born from a vague idea, other times, a memory and in some instances, just a sound.

Hailing from Russia and relocating to different regions, the members of the collective also draw from cultures and their shifts. Their workshops have travelled to Germany, Italy, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Israel, Slovakia, Latvia and Estonia—building a growing cross-cultural network across the globe. Elaborating on these influences, Boguslavsky says, “I have Jewish origins and am inspired by those traditions. Now almost the whole team has immigrated to different places, it is an important experience to live in another country; it gives a lot of inspiration.”

Along with Asya Kiseleva, Boguslavsky is currently working on a film titled Maybe Yes, Maybe No, based on a mystical and comical ballad about the hapless sages of the Jewish town of Chelm. The original text in Yiddish was written by poet Ovsey (Shike) Driz, while the music and performance are by Psoy Korolenko and Masha Vasilevskaya. 

The shtetl of Chelm is a town of fools, where for many centuries everything has been topsy-turvy. Once in the forest near Chelm, the wise Reb-Nuchim encountered an unprecedented miracle - a huge snowdrift.

Will the sages of Chelm be able to find in its depths the answer to “the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”?

In the daily haste, a collective rush towards something, the ability to step back and pause is a gift. Listening to, imagining and observing stories is an unwonted virtue. Storytellers, such as the Invisible Friends, strive to build otherworldly bridges to a transient escape where one is allowed to contemplate at ease. The warm embrace of stop-motion animation, flavoured with a sense of childhood nostalgia, ushers the viewers to new perspectives or sometimes to revisit familiar ones—and in the fictitious characters and the web of emotions they weave, one rendezvouses with an ‘invisible friend.’

A leaf falls from a tree, a car drives past and raises dust clouds, and a water strider beetle glides silently through the water like a small skater.
If you take the time to look closely, it turns out that these fragile and seemingly insignificant things fill life with meaning.
And in the contemplation of this, there is both joy and sadness.

- ‘A White White Day’, by Invisible Friends