TV Reviews : Animated Shakespeare Fails to Communicate

“Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” a six-part series of half-hour specials, gets off to a disappointing start tonight with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (at 7:30 on HBO). The aim of this multinational co-production--to present appealing versions of these stories to children--is admirable, but the results have all the pizazz of a glass of diluted lemonade.

Leon Garfield, who adapted the plays, does an adequate job of condensing the intertwining plots of “Dream” into an easy-to-follow half hour, although he relies heavily on off-screen narrator Menna Trussler.

But the animation itself, created at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow, fails to communicate the magic and humor of the play. The simply designed human characters look like escapees from a Saturday morning kidvid program, and they move with a similar lack of grace. The animators fail to establish styles of movement that distinguish the ethereal spirits, polished courtiers and rude clowns, and the stiffly drawn faces can’t express the nuances of emotion needed to put the story across.

Designer-director Robert Saakyants ignores the fantastic possibilities animation offers. He stages scenes as if he were copying an uninspired live-action production, instead of utilizing the opportunity the medium affords to make the characters fly and metamorphose.

Other artists have animated Shakespeare: Czech puppet animator Jiri Trnka’s exquisite feature based on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1959) has been reissued on laser disc; Barry Purvis recently synopsized more than two dozen of the plays in the brilliant five-minute short “Next.” Both directors treated Shakespeare’s work as a jumping-off point for an artistic vision, rather than turning out the television equivalent of a Classics Comics book.