Death and the Penguin
Category
Motion
Mentor
Noa Kahana
Year
2025
Opening titles sequence for the novel Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. Using the newspaper motive to reflect the book’s themes of death, corruption,
and quiet absurdity, revealing names only when they’re crossed out, just like the "X's" in Viktor’s obituaries.
The Brief
The brief was to create an animated title sequence for a book, translating its themes, tone, and atmosphere into a visual and motion language.
The Story
Death and the Penguin is a dark comedy about Viktor, a struggling writer in post-Soviet Kyiv who is hired to write newspaper obituaries for people who are still alive. Known only as “X’s,” his subjects soon begin dying one by one.
The Concept
The sequence unfolds entirely through newspaper pages. Cast and crew names are hidden within the columns and revealed only when crossed out with an X — directly borrowing the logic of Viktor’s obituaries.
Visual Research
The visual language was developed through archival newspaper references, focusing on layout, column density, typography, image treatment, and the imperfections of printed newsprint.
The palette stays close to newsprint — black and white, with red reserved for the X marks.
Animatic
Development
Each newspaper page was built from archival references, with the cast and crew names embedded into the layouts.
The pages were then printed and rescanned multiple times, testing different paper stocks, printer settings, and scanner settings until the result felt convincingly like real newsprint.
