Year: 1999
Language: English
Format: IMAX 70mm Colour
Runtime: 40 min
Director: Alexander Petrov
Producer: Bernard Lajoie, Tatsuo Shimamura
Executive Producer: Jean-Yves Martel, Shizuo Ohashi
Writer: Alexander Petrov, Ernest Hemingway
Cinematographer: Serguei Rechetnikoff
Editor: Denis Papillon
: Alexander Petrov, Dimitri Petrov
Sound: Marcel Pothier, Antoine Morin
Music: Normand Roger
Cast: Gordon Pinsent, Kevin Delaye
Production Company: Les Productions Pascal Blais, Imagica Corp. (Japan), Dentsu Tec (Japan), NHK Enterprise 21 (Japan), Panorama Studio (Russia)

The Old Man and the Sea is an ambitious, internationally acclaimed animated adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tale about an elderly, world-weary fisherman’s struggle to land a giant marlin. The first animated IMAX film, it was painstakingly painted by fingertip on 29,000 individual glass frames using slow-drying oil paints. Russian animator Alexander Petrov (an Academy Award® nominee for his 1990 short, The Cow), who is considered one of the world’s masters of this rare and difficult technique, took three years to complete the film at a cost of $2.2 million. The beautiful, impressionistic style creates the fluid and lyrical effect of a painting that is constantly in motion.

The Old Man and the Sea won numerous international awards, including the Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, a Jutra Award for Best Animated Film and an Academy Award® for Animated Short. The film (trimmed to twenty-two minutes for its Swedish release) was screened in conjunction with Erik Canuel’s IMAX live-action documentary short, Hemingway: A Portrait (1999). Both films were co-produced by Montreal’s Les Productions Pascal Blais.