 On March 13, 2007, Norstein stated that he planned to release the first 30 minutes of the film with a soundtrack into theatres by the end of 2007.However, as of 2020, the film remains unfinished, and its production time of 39 years is the longest for any motion picture in history.Upon finishing his film "Tale of Tales" in 1979 Norstein decided that the next project for his small team (consisting of himself as the animator and director, his wife Franchesca Yarbusova as the artist and his friend Aleksandr Zhukovskiy as the cinematographer) would be an approximately 60-minute-long film based on Gogol's short story "The Overcoat".