Well, here's an actually good film for a change, after 2 days of less-than-stellar ones (that I uploaded mainly because they required little work to add)...
The draftsmanship of the artwork - really going for that early 20th century "Silver Age" upper class style - is wonderful. The style reminds me of the early animated films of Winsor McCay, although I doubt Amalrik had seen them. Generally speaking, less realistic styles were definitely more popular in Soviet animation in that year (although it was only two years later that prominent young director Anatoliy Petrov would switch mainly to a realistic style himself).

The danger with portraying a boring life is that it risks the film itself being boring, and it does move quite slowly by today's standards. I myself liked it, but those used to fast-paced thrills may not. Amalrik was past retirement age at 64 when he directed this, and it would be his second-last film after a brilliant career that had started in the early 1930s.

As for the subtitles, there was very little to translate. It is so close to being in the "wordless" category, but because of the girl's letter - no, not quite. The old 2016 subtitles were for an older video of the film that had 5 seconds missing in one place and 4 seconds in another, so the timings in the last half had to be corrected.

This is a weird one. It was made during a transitional period in more ways than one. Traditional analogue animation techniques were being replaced by digital ones, which were still very rough (as one can clearly see here). The studio Soyuzmultfilm had recently been liquidated and all its old personnel fired, only to be "recreated" as two different organizations both called "Soyuzmultfilm": one which had the rights to the old catalogue, and another that was supposed to continue making films (but with no source of income other than government grants). The country had recently had a currency crash and a financial crisis, as well as a new president.

I suppose the "new" studio had to prove that it was making films, and the three to-be graduates needed something on their CV, so Hitruk and Boyarskiy managed to arrange for their students to release something through the studio, creating a new series for short films similar to Merry-Go-Round (which I think was on a brief hiatus during this period). I don't think a "Goat #2" was ever made.

All in all, these three people graduated from the School of Advanced Studies at a very uncertain time, and subsequently kind of slipped between the cracks. None of them have any other work listed in animator.ru, although Yusupov (who had come from Tajikistan and had already received two film-related diplomas there) went on to make some commercials, music videos and short documentaries. As for the other two, I can't find a thing about them. Not even Polovnikova's first name.

The best animation in the film is honestly of the goat who appears in between the three shorts, who has a charm that reminds me of the studio's classic work of the 1960s and 1970s. I wonder who animated her? It doesn't really look like any of the other animation.

To be honest, I find this one rather mysterious and hard to figure out - I'm still not really sure what the relationship between the two "stories" is (the humans in the car looking at the rodents in a decaying building, versus the story of the rodents in the lab). Is it meant to be a flashback? I'll probably watch this again at some point and see if I can understand it better.

Another Uzbek animation (like most from the past 2 weeks). I find this one to be a bit pointless/aimless, honestly, and the jerky camera motion (often even while the camera is meant to be staying still!) is kind of irritating. The character design of the tricycle is nice, though. It seems that the director was around at the very beginning of Uzbek animation in the mid-1960s, and her last film was in 2022, so she had quite a long career.

As far as the story of "toy escapes from a shop window to find a child to be with", I think The Blue Arrow (1985) did it better.

Sorta psychedelic ;d

An interesting later film by the director of the famous There Will Come Soft Rains (1984). It shows just how much directors can be influenced by the society around them, and what sort of audience they are aiming their film at. Back then, Tashkent was the 4th biggest city in one of the two global superpowers, and the director was aiming at a sophisticated, cosmopolitan audience, adapting a story that warns about humanity's future. What resulted was a striking film that won international awards and counts British royalty among its fans. In 2011, the potential distribution of his film was limited to just Uzbekistan, so he adapted a more mythic, patriotic story from the distant past.

There's a big change in animation technique too, of course. Although I think that in both cases, the films have some impressive and striking visuals, and a certain love of detail.

Speaking of the story itself, I went digging around and finally found the only surviving ancient Greek textual source. Finding it was made more difficult because all of the names are spelled differently in Greek than they are in Uzbek. Despite some differences, it's clearly a version of the same story, with the same names. It shows that the tale has been around for a long time, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were different versions of it even back then. Frankly, the ending of that Greek version - in which the army is saved after the Persian King Darius prays to the Greek god Apollo (wasn't Zoroastrianism the main religion there back then?) - seems pretty suspicious to me. I suppose they couldn't all die because in that version King Darius is with the army as well, and his date and place of death are well-known (the story wouldn't be believable if it claimed that Darius died there).

Regarding the translation, it is based entirely on the Russian voice-over dub. I don't know Uzbek, so if the Uzbek text differs at all from the Russian, the subtitles may not be entirely accurate. Also, the Russian actor interchangeably says both "Shirok" and "Shirak". The first is closer to the Uzbek name, and the second is closer to the one in "Strategems" ("Siraces").

I imagine it was a bit of challenge to make a film that has no characters other than trees - and not trees with faces, either. I think the atmosphere of the peaceful forest, and then of something very wrong and malevolent appearing in it, comes through quite well. As for the possible political aspect - yes, it's hard for me not to see this as a veiled critique of the Soviet government and a prediction of its collapse (which was still 3 years away, but by this point things were obviously beginning to unravel). But the message could be a broader one as well - about how seemingly invincible and sturdy things may yet have an unexpected weakness due to their very nature.

A charming film. The bold, simple character designs out of geometric figures and with bold colours remind me of the puppet films of Roman Kachanov at Soyuzmultfilm around the same time (no wonder, since Salimov apparently studied there). It is also beautifully restored except for the music cutting out for about 30 seconds. Kind of odd to see the sheer enthusiasm for pesticides here - this was before it became fashionable to reduce their use due to the effects on human health. The way it ends slightly reminds me of Bendum and Twistum: Merry Masters (1960), in which the pests are similarly defeated with pesticides at the end.

>>3
Спасибо, убрал неправильныю ссылку.

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