This film of Bardin's has only just been made available online (published on Soyuzmultfilm's YouTube and VK channels, of all places - this marks his first time working together with Soyuzmultfilm since 1990, I believe), although he's made two more since then - "Ave Maria" (funded 2021, finished 2023) and "Everlasting Lament" (funded and finished 2024) - and is in middle of crowdfunding another one (Russian Waltz). I think all of Bardin's films since his 2010 feature "The Ugly Duckling" seem to have roughly the same scaffolding: take one or several pieces of famous classical music, take some sort of didactic message formed from Bardin's impressions of the society around him, and play it out wordlessly using puppet animation closely synchronized to the music. Actually, I would even say that he's been doing that since the 1990s, but there used to be more other elements involved, more attention to character and story, to the joy of movement and art, and I think it led to some of his best work (1990s-2000s). Whereas his more recent productions have become more spartan, more focused... but also more artificial-feeling as a result, almost more akin to student films. I watched this and thought near the beginning "kids don't play like that - sitting symmetrically on either side and robotically putting sand into their buckets". But being in time to the music seemed to be more important than having characters act realistically. To compare, his earlier film Chucha 3 (2004) also had a little boy whose movements were closely timed to the music, sometimes a bit artificially, yet the final effect was more natural and heartfelt.

The final didactic message is that "normal", "rich" and "poor/criminal" elements of society should cooperate in order to all be collectively better off.

A sweet cartoon for really little kids. I must say, the new restoration makes it look really stunning - the beauty of this more "modernist" 1960s art style really shines. This was made in the fifth year of the "rebirth" of Ukrainian animation, after being suspended in the late 1930s. Effectively, this means that unlike Russian and Georgian and even Armenian animation (which had animation studios through this period, though barely so in Armenia's case), Ukrainian animation never went through any sort of "socialist realist" phase.

I find Golovanova's cartoons of the 1980s to have a really beautiful, fluid animation style, with pretty interesting screenplays as well. My favourite is still "Sweet Porridge", but I really liked this one as well. There hasn't been much commentary about it, but I liked the review by Alessandro Criscitiello that I found on LetterboxD:
"Facing loneliness together through a surreal, melancholic and virtually endless circus act. Beautiful. I'd never stop watching it."

The screenplay here feels very sparse to fill up a whole 10 minutes, so there are a lot of antics that seem to be there simply to fill time. I like the 1947 cartoon much better (though it, too, feels a bit overlong in the first half).

It's unfortunate that the video quality is so poor, because it hides quite a good film with excellent modernist art direction and great animation (very likely inspired by Fyodor Hitruk's The Story of a Crime from 2 years earlier). It also gives a good look at typical domestic life of the time.

Ah, now this is nostalgic. The feeling I get from this one is very uniquely of that era; also, I can't imagine this kind of melancholy, but sweet and sincere cartoon about friendship, loss and sacrifice ever being made in the West. The ending is wonderful in how it doesn't force upon the viewer any interpretation that they're not ready for.

I like the story and the film.

But I am annoyed by the art style in Amalrik's post-1950s films (including this one) where everyone's legs (including those of birds) are human-shaped. Birds' "knees" should bend the other way!

I much prefer Karayev's later films from the 1980s, but this clearly does what it was commissioned to do (warn about the dangers of not following the rules of the road and drinking), while being fun to watch. Public opinion (e.g. from here) seems quite positive.

At 1:48, the TV is playing "Это вы можете" (You Can Do This), a show about how things were made that ran from 1973-1993. A few episodes can be found here.

Armenian director Robert Sahakyants adapted a very similar tale fifteen years earlier: Who Will Tell a Fable? (1982)

I found the title of this film rather difficult to translate. Perhaps there's a better solution. Eus's suggestion was the literal "What in the world doesn't happen!" but that Russian expression doesn't have the same meaning in English (also, it's not just "happen" but also "exist").

I think this movie is exceptionally well-structured and it's one of my favourite Russian animated features. Despite the rather bland short live-action intro at the beginning. It also has interesting characters - even the "villains" are often shown to have redeeming features. It is told from the perspective of an old-school Indo-European culture, and assumes social mores that to modern sensibilities seem really alien.

In some places, the English title is given as "The Magic Reed-Pipe". However, there is clearly no reed on the instrument. It seems to be a fipple flute. I considered "The Magic Flute" but I think the confusion with the famous work by Mozart would be too much.

I did some work to fix the sound synchronization issues (see notes in the English subtitles description).

I hope we get a proper release of this film one day, without with strange luma ghosting artifacts in the video, and with well-synced, stereo audio (it was released with only one working audio channel on DVD).