Igor Kovalyov currently serves as a creative producer at Soyuzmultfilm.
17 Facts About Igor Kovalyov
1.
2.
Igor Kovalyov finished animation courses at Goskino where his teachers were Yevgeny Sivokon and David Cherkassky.
3.
Igor Kovalyov met Alexander Tatarsky during the studies, his closest friend since.
4.
Kievnauchfilm refused to let them go, and only in 1979 Igor Kovalyov was allowed to leave, while Tatarsky fled to Moscow on his own.
5.
Igor Kovalyov studied under Fyodor Khitruk, Yuri Norstein, Vladimir Pekar and Violetta Kolesnikova.
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Igor Kovalyov then returned to Moscow and started directing films alongside Tatarsky.
7.
In 1989 Igor Kovalyov directed his first auteur film Hen His Wife which became an international success and gained him his first Grand Prize at the 1990 Ottawa International Animation Festival.
8.
Igor Kovalyov was noticed by Gabor Csupo who immediately offered him a place at Klasky Csupo.
9.
Igor Kovalyov turned down the offer and returned to Moscow to finish Andrei Svislotskiy.
10.
Igor Kovalyov started working as an animator on The Simpsons, then moved to work on Rugrats as a director and character designer.
11.
Igor Kovalyov contacted some of the leading Pilot animators and suggested them to join him.
12.
Nevertheless, Igor Kovalyov visited Tatarsky every year till his death in 2007 and discussed future plans.
13.
Igor Kovalyov rewrote the screenplay along the way, filling it with specific jokes and gags.
14.
In 1998 he co-directed The Rugrats Movie which grossed $141 million, breaking the box office record for a non-Disney animated film, although Igor Kovalyov was left unhappy with it, claiming there was a heavy pressure from producers this time around and many of his ideas didn't make into the movie.
15.
Bird in a Window, Flying Nansen and Milch gained a number of awards at international film festivals, although the latter was finished when the studio was already in sharp decline, and Igor Kovalyov had to seek sponsorship from his former father-in-law, a famous Russian lawyer Genrikh Padva who is listed in the credits as a producer.
16.
On December 2017 Igor Kovalyov joined Soyuzmultfilm as a creative producer and worked on Prostokvashino, a successful re-launch of the Soviet mini-series Three from Prostokvashino.
17.
Igor Kovalyov is currently working on another revival of the popular Soviet series about parrot Kesha and his next auteur animation A Peacock Is Flying to the South-East.