Throughout the 1970s, Pars continued to fuse his love of nature with animation and the best results were River of Life and Song to the Spring. Song to the Spring combines puppet animation with live-action backgrounds as an old man awakes with the day and conducts the forest birds, flowers, sun and grass to rise and sing. The mixture of puppet animation and live-action is awkward at times. The puppet character does not add any special dimension to the film that a live actor could not have. In fact, the film is essentially a live-action film. Nonetheless, Pars manages to express his love of nature enthusiastically yet gently, without crossing into the realm of cheesy new-age serenity. Nothing feels forced or deliberate; Song to the Spring emerges simply as a document of the new day and season, a celebration of re-awakening and the on-going process of being.

Heino Pars, who worked as a cinematographer for Nukufilm, created and developed the studio's first animation series, Little Motor Scooter, which introduced Kõps the cameraman.

River of Life is a fitting end to Pars’ career. (He did make two more films after that, but neither are particularly interesting.) As the title suggests, the constant motion of the river symbolizes that of life. While there is a thread linking the film’s images, ending with the birth of a child, the film is at times more akin to non-narrative experimental film. Pars seems intent on capturing the fluidity, conflict and random beauty of the always-flowing river. Pars possesses a great eye for detail. He doesn’t just blandly depict the water as a whole but shows us its individual drops in all their fragility and personality, and further takes us underwater to show us an assortment of forms, shapes and creatures. The river, like life, is marked by ebb and flow… this, now that.

A New Generation: Attempt #1
During the latter half of the 1970s, Elbert Tuganov realized that he and Pars were getting wrinkly and that new directors were needed. With the exception of two attempts in the early 1970s, Tuganov and Pars were the only directors at the studio from 1958-1975. “They were so full of power and energy,” says Arvo Nuut, the current Nukufilm producer, “They didn’t lack ideas and did the work that had to be done but after that period they realized that new people were needed.” They sought people who could easily fit into the style and ambitions of the studio. This first group, which included well-known Estonian artist Kaarel Kurismaa, Nukufilm animator Aarne Ahi and former cameraman Kalju Kurepõld, did not work out as hoped. Kurismaa and Kurepõld were already mature artists. The films were not so good. Everyone but Ahi returned to their own artistic worlds. By 1980 Nukufilm was back to square one.

Tuganov Goes Hi-tech
Meanwhile, Tuganov made a handful of technically audacious films, including the astonishing time-lapse film Inspiration (1975), a document of the famous Estonian song festival, and what may be the world’s first stereoscopic (what we used to call 3D films) puppet animation films Souvenir (1977) and The Dappled Colt (1981).

Inspiration is perhaps Tuganov’s finest achievement, at least conceptually. The film is a pixillated document of the preparations for, and performance of, the famous Estonian Song Festival. We witness the day’s swift rise, then people dressing and assembling for the festival, and by the film’s end, a massive gathering of Estonians singing. The film is seemingly unremarkable in that it’s just a gathering of people, a conventional chronology of a day in the life. But when one considers that this was Soviet-occupied Estonia during the repressive days of USSR President Leonid Brezhnev, the film is a monumental patriotic achievement. It stands as a subtle, yet ultimately overwhelming, celebration of Estonian culture in firm defiance of Soviet occupation.

Following Inspiration, Tuganov decided to make a 3D (stereoscopic) animation film. Tuganov had become fascinated with 3D film technology after seeing the work of some Moscow filmmakers. “The Russian technology was different from the American system,” says Tuganov. “The Americans simultaneously projected film from three different projectors onto the same screen to create the effect. In the Russian system, the camera squashed the picture together into one frame. The lens of the projector decompressed the picture into 3D format and only one projector was needed. The negative was the same, only the frame was slightly larger.” Upon returning from Moscow, Tuganov decided to make the first 3D puppet film in the USSR and encountered no objections from Moscow nor Tallinnfilm. The 3D process was so interesting to Tuganov that he made another stereoscopic film, Dappled Colt, which would turn out (although he didn’t know it at the time) to be his final film.