Hedgehog In The Fog vs An Elephant In Your Mind

There is an enormous amount of emotion to be mined from the appealingly basic scenario of a diminutive animal attempting to navigate its way through a bout of uninviting weather. This is something that Russian animator Yuri Norstein understood when he made his 1975 film Hedgehog in The Fog (or Yozhik v Tumane), which was produced at the Soyuzmultfilm animation studio in Moscow. The film concerns a small hedgehog (Maria Vinogradova) who every evening journeys out to see his friend the bear for an idyllic night of drinking tea and counting the stars. On this particular evening, the hedgehog notices a horse up ahead surrounded by a strange fog, and grows concerned that the horse will perish should she become engulfed by the fog. The hedgehog ventures into the fog, intending to talk to the horse, only to lose his own bearings and become trapped in the pale and indistinct world. There, the hedgehog is terrorised by a number of unfamiliar beings and assisted by others, and eventually tumbles into a stream, where he is saved from drowning by a mysterious "Someone", who carries him to the shore. In the final scene, we see that the hedgehog has made it safely to the bear (Vyacheslav Nevinny), who is exasperated at his friend's tardiness, stating that he had been calling out repeatedly to the hedgehog and was distressed to have received no answer. The hedgehog thinks how fortunate it is that he has found his way back to the bear and that they can enjoy another evening of counting the stars. However, he remains unsettled by the thought that the horse is still stranded out there in the fog and wonders what, ultimately, will become of her.

Hedgehog in The Fog remains one of the most enduring examples of Soviet animation, with admirers the world over (it was voted the greatest animated film of all time at a Tokyo film festival in 2003), and it isn't difficult to see why. There are very few films, animated or otherwise, that encapsulate quite the same sense of unsettling melancholy and beguiling eeriness. We feel the smallness of the protagonist and the overpowering magnitude of his surroundings - surroundings which, which the nocturnal haze, appear at once grotesque, ethereal and beautifully sombre. Above all, it's an intensely enigmatic piece. It tells a deceptively simple story, and yet everything within it feels as it could be a symbol for something far greater. The narrative, with its talking animals and elegant brevity, has all the trappings of a traditional Aesopian allegory, but does not make its meaning explicit and ends on a deliberately open-ended note, one in which the hedgehog achieves his initial goal of joining the bear for a night of star-gazing, but it feels as if we've barely scratched the surface of the bigger picture unfolding all around them, and several key questions are left without answers. It plays like a fable, but presents as the most fiendish of riddles.

An obvious interpretation is that the film is about confronting the unknown, for it is the hedgehog's decision to tear away from his nightly routine and go in search of an altogether different truth that leads to his being lost and his nearly cut off from everything that he once knew. To take any kind of step in the dark (or into the pale, in this case) is a risky business. And yet, one thing that Hedgehog in The Fog emphatically is not is a cautionary fable about the perils of deviating from the beaten track, not least because there is ample reason to believe that the hedgehog is in danger before he makes the fateful decision to enter into the fog. From almost the beginning of the film, we have the disturbing imagery of the hedgehog being stalked by the shadowy figure of the owl, who emerges very suddenly as the hedgehog passes through a dark patch of trees. The owl is a puzzling character, in that its intentions are overall very difficult to gauge; its dark, looming form, pronounced talons and the frightening proximity with which it attaches itself to the unwitting hedgehog give it an ominously predatory air, and yet the owl is clearly not without a playful side and at first seems more interested in mimicking the hedgehog than in preying on him. We are left with two seemingly contradictory ways in which to interpret the owl - either it is a benign (if not entirely benevolent) figure who merely appears frightening in the dead of night, or it is a very genuine danger lurking within plain sight, which the hedgehog, in his terminal complacency, remains entirely oblivious to. Hedgehog in The Fog may be a film about gazing into the unknown and attempting not to lose yourself in the process, but it also has a lot to say about the dangers of the familiar, and of assuming that one is safe simply because one has walked this same route a hundred times before.

The crucial thing, to me, is that the hedgehog starts out with a very narrow, insular perspective of the world, and it is only by going through the nebulous, alien world of the fog that he finally gains clarity. As the film begins we might argue that the hedgehog already lives in a kind of fog, one which enables him to behave as if he and the bear are the sole inhabitants of the world and keeps him oblivious to the suffering and concerns of those outside of it. His existence with the bear is innocent and carefree, but it is also fragile, with the insidious figure of the owl suggesting that it could be disrupted and torn apart at any moment. Ignorance, ultimately, will not protect them. When the hedgehog is able to see past his self-imposed fog and becomes aware of the horse standing in the literal fog, his perspective is forever changed. His compassion and curiosity over this enigmatic creature compel him to get involved with something far greater than him, and well beyond his understanding. The price for his broadened horizon is the total loss of innocence, for although the hedgehog spends much of the film fighting to get back to what he once knew, this proves to be futile. The hedgehog makes it back to the bear and the two are able to resume their usual routine of drinking tea and counting stars, but the hedgehog we see at the end is clearly not the same hedgehog who first set foot into the fog. Something has changed.

The great irony is that, even when our protagonist is trapped in the unfamiliar terrain of the fog, the familiar is never far away, physically speaking - the voice of the bear can be heard calling out to the hedgehog all throughout his ordeal. The hedgehog's friendship with the bear remains his key lifeline, keeping him anchored to the world from which he has strayed, and it is the hedgehog's misplacement of his sack of raspberry jam, a token of their friendship, that proves the most disastrous point of his excursion, an indication that he is in danger of never finding his way back. Within the fog, the hedgehog suddenly becomes aware that the world around him is very populated, and various strangers slowly reveal themselves in the haze. Some of them prove to be unexpected allies, while others merely deepen his escalating panic. Among the latter camp, we have the owl, who has followed the hedgehog into the fog and (intentionally or not) scares him witless. We also have bats and a snail. Most terrifying of all, though, is the elephant. The hedgehog runs into an elephant in the fog that should not be there, and in all likelihood isn't, but is no less ominous for it.

The elephant is glimpsed only briefly, first of all when the hedgehog disturbs a snail beneath a leaf and later during a montage of shots in which the hedgehog is suddenly bombarded with horrifying images within the fog. It is by far the most absurd item the hedgehog encounters out there (being distinctly out of place among those European forest fauna), and yet it passes without comment from either the narrator or the hedgehog. It is never seen clearly, only as a murky, indistinct silhouette that nevertheless bears the recognisable shape and stature of an elephant, and it is alarming, because we are never entirely certain what we are seeing. We think we see an elephant, but we never get a close enough look at the shape in question to be sure if our hero really is being menaced by a fog-dwelling pachyderm, or if this is simply his mind playing tricks on him. The elephant occurs so fleetingly that it may not even register for the first-time viewer, yet it strikes me as significant as I'm convinced that the elephant is intended to be the antithesis of the horse.

The horse, whose solitary plight compels the hedgehog to venture into the fog, represents something precious yet also fragile; an integral component of film that, as absurd as the hedgehog's specific concern about the horse choking on the fog might be, we certainly never doubt that the hedgehog was right to take an interest in the fate of the horse. Something about the horse allures us; it is every bit as beautiful in its purity as it is haunting in its vulnerability. It stands out as something worth protecting and understanding, but do so one is required to traverse the unknowable and wrestle with uncertainty, and this comes with its own set of hazards. If the horse, an emblem of truth and purity, is what you enter into the fog hoping to find, then the elephant is what you risk running into in its place. The elephant embodies everything that the horse does not - confusion, distortion, dislocation, dread. It is a symbol of the world being warped out of perspective and, instead of getting closer to the truth, the hedgehog is now in danger of being consumed completely by his overwhelming incomprehension. The elephant is the oblivion lurking at the other end of the fog. Why an elephant? Obviously, its great looming form clues us in as the magnitude of the threat, but I am also put in mind of the ancient Indian fable about the blind men and the elephant, with its warnings about the pitfalls of regarding the world from a limited perspective.

Not everything that lurks in the fog is a threat, of course - the hedgehog survives his ordeal through the intervention and support of various other creatures. A dog reunites him with his misplaced sack of raspberry jam (once the hedgehog has recovered this, he becomes aware of the bear calling to him), a firefly temporarily lights his way (although it just as casually abandons him) and the "Someone" within the water carries him to dry land. At the heart of Hedgehog in The Fog appears to be a message about how none of us can endure without empathy and co-operation, but there is nonetheless a troubling distance to these interactions; the dog and the firefly share no words with the hedgehog, and the "Someone" insists on maintaining their anonymity. Friendships of the kind enjoyed between the hedgehog and the bear are entirely alien here; animals do what they can to help another in need but seem cautious, as if unwilling to reveal too much of themselves. Once they have done their bit, they have served their purpose and must immediately move on. There is no room for star-counting and tea-drinking within the fog.

At the end of the film, the bear tells the hedgehog that there is nobody else with whom he would be able to count the stars; this speaks again of the very insular nature of the hedgehog's existence outside of the fog, in which he and the bear are able to live as if they have the entire universe to themselves, but acts all the more potently as reminder of just how frail and endangered their world blatantly is. The guilelessness that characterises their nightly routine is, we sense, a little too precious and wholesome to last with so much darkness and foreboding creeping right around the corner. For now, their routine is able to continue for at least another night, but we can see in the final scene that a wedge has already been driven between the bear and the hedgehog - the latter appears in a daze, and not wholly attuned to the concerns of his friend. His thoughts, after all, are still with the horse, of whose plight the bear remains blissfully ignorant. The hedgehog's eyes have been opened - he comprehends that the world is a wider, more intricate and more desolate place than he'd ever imagined, a knowledge that sets him visibly apart from his companion, and yet paradoxically his uncertainty has only heightened. The hedgehog never learns the fate of the horse, and it is this unsettling loose end, this feeling of connection with the vulnerability of a stranger, that keeps him from retreating back into the comforting blindness of his own metaphorical fog. He has joined the bigger world (or more accurately, acknowledged that he was always a part of it), where things are not so easily resolved or understood, and where the pursuit of answers might only lead to further questions. All that he truly knows is somewhere in the fog is a horse who may not ever find her own way out. And that is enough that he cannot look back.