Following Macbeth with another tale of a murderous, usurping king and his comeuppance: an especially beautiful, every-frame-a-painting Hamlet (1992), likewise from “Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.”
It begins, like both Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s versions, with waves crashing on the rocks below Elsinore; but the ghost is clearly based quite directly on the Kozintsev ghost – not surprising, given how many artists involved with these projects are Russians, for whom Kozintsev’s work is presumably more familiar than it is to many in the Anglophone audience. (If you get a chance to see the Kozintsev versions of Hamlet and Lear, don’t miss them!)
