1999 SAW THE COMPLETION OF THE FIRST-EVER ANIMATED IMAX® FILM, “THE OLD MAN & THE SEA”, DIRECTED BY THE RUSSIAN DIRECTOR, ALEXANDER PETROV, AND BASED ON HEMINWAY’S FAMOUS NOVELLA.

The project was initiated in 1995 following a meeting between the Russian Director, Alexander Petrov and Studio Pascal Blais. Work on the film began in March 1997 in Montreal and was funded by an assortment of Canadian, Russian and Japanese companies. It took Alexander Petrov and his son Dmitri Petrov two years to paint each frame. Petrov painted with his fingertips directly underneath our custom-built Imax® animation camera, doing the animation directly with oil paints on large sheets of glass. Over 29,000 images were created in the making of this multiple-award-winning film. French and English-language soundtracks to the film were released concurrently. It was the first animated film to be released in IMAX®. The film won many awards, including an Oscar® for Best Animated Short Film.