Hedgehog in the Fog

Here's a beautiful little animated movie that Mary Ann would like to pass on. A screening of this film would add a nice touch to the annual Kindergarten hedgehog habitat unit.

Hedgehog in the Fog [Ёжик в тумане], Yuriy Norshteyn (1975)

This is a story about a little hedgehog (voiced by Mariya Vinogradova) and his friend bear cub (voiced by Vyacheslav Nevinniy). The two would meet every evening to drink tea from the cub's samovar, which was heated on a fire of juniper twigs. As they drank their tea, the hedgehog and the bear conversed and counted the stars together. One day, the hedgehog decided to bring raspberry jam. As he went to the bear to count the stars, he passed through the woods and found a horse standing in a fog, where the hedgehog can't even see his own pink paw. He is curious as to whether the horse would drown if it went to sleep in the fog. The hedgehog decides to explore the fog.



Hedgehogs have a special place in the world of art... Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, meant as "a kind of enjoyable intellectual game" of classification, based on a thought attributed by the Greek poet Archilochus. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"

In his 1953 essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, Berlin poses that writers and thinkers can be divided into two categories: 1) Hedgehogs, those who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea such as Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust and 2) Foxes, those who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson).

But there are always exceptions to neatly defined categories. When writing about Tolstoy, Berlin finds that his subject is a little of both and decides Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, while his beliefs are aligned with the hedgehog.

If you had to choose, which would you be?
A fox or a hedgehog?