Rescued by a hare the size of a wolf. ????

Are the animals in the front row caricatures of Soviet music critics from the period?

Though the early Merry-Go-Rounds (from the 1960s) are more famous, I think they continued to be pretty good even as the studio began falling apart in the 1990s. This one is a good example - all of the entries are pretty strong. For the last, this isn't surprising and its director (Golovanova) was a veteran. But the first two are strong first works by new directors.

The style of the first should be immediately recognizable for fans of Vladimir Tarasov, as Koshkin was his art director, and a big part of what made those films so great. So it is here - the story could easily be boring, but the well-drawn art, characters, and inventive camera angles make it shine. Unfortunately, Koshkin never did get the chance to do any more directing.

The other new director, Guryev, was more lucky. His segment here adapts a literary original that is practically unadaptable (because it's like a miniature "Finnegans Wake", relying heavily on wordplay and things you can only do in writing), and he solved the problem by almost ignoring the text and doing a similar thing purely with visuals. How do you even animate things seen through warped glass? I can't imagine. The fat cat would reappear in Guryev's later work.

"Little Ram" is an English absurdity - actually, far more absurd in the adaptation here than the original folk song is. There seems to be a lot of love for English absurdity in Russia (I could name quite a few animated examples, starting with the 1970s works of Andrey Hrzhanovskiy), and in the early 1990s it seems to have been especially trendy.

>>2
>Anyone else noticed there are no wolves in the audience?
Not until now, good catch!

Also, I edited my post above to cite a relevant book that I read once.

A collection of three short films. Although the intention of the Merry-Go-Round series was mainly to springboard young talent, in this edition, there was not a single "young" director - the two men had already directed a few critically-acclaimed full-length (10 minute) "solo" films of their own, while Galina Barinova (Petrov's wife) was on her seventh mini-film. For all three, this would be the last "Merry-Go-Round" they would ever participate in.

Barinova's film is on the shorter side even for her, and quite simple (though well executed).

The highlight of the three is definitely Anatoliy Petrov's. The art direction is amazing. It looks beautiful, and its realistic portrayal of the underwater world reminds me of Miyazaki's "Ponyo" (which came much later). He did a lot of research and all the animation, too (because of course - who else could have done it?). The plot reminded me of some other films: Bardin's The Ugly Duckling (2010) and Yelena Petkevich's Forest Tales (1997). Unlike in Bardin's film, nobody is really maliciously mean to our main character - the denizens of the deep are simply afraid, and he does not end up friendless - although the very end of both films is the same. Whereas with "Forest Tales", the main difference is in the ending: that firefly finds other fireflies like himself at the end (just like here), but comes to realize that the light of home is what he really desires.

Valeriy Ugarov's entry is a lot of stylistic wackiness and nice animation, but seems to lack (at least, for me) a really strong central idea, unless it's simply that underlings can often be more nasty than their bosses.

Anyone else noticed there are no wolves in the audience?

>>1
>it serves as a warning to those who only desire a peaceful life within their family home.
I see something different - I think it shows the tragedy that can result when traditional family functions and responsibilities are not followed. The first failure is of the son, who does not respect his father and rebels against him (he thinks he knows best, though actually he is in the wrong). The second failure is of the father, who is unable to forgive and better instruct his son, and decides to cast him out, though the son is naive and unready. The third failure, perhaps, is of the daughters, who, due to their grief, abandon their father in his old age.

This was Akop Kirakosyan's final film. I'm not exactly clear on what happened after. The studio had, by this point, been taken over by organized crime and being sold off for parts. The number of directors who could keep working in those circumstances was fewer and fewer each year. According to animator.ru, he moved into the studio's management in 1997, and became the studio director from 2004-2009.

He only made three films, but had quite a distinctive style, dynamic and gritty - apparently influenced by the aesthetic of early Pilot Studio & Tatarskiy, or maybe Sergey Kushnerov in Ukraine.

All of Akop Kirakosyan's films seem to be about the injustice, stupidity, excess and self-destruction he was seeing around him as the USSR was collapsing and transitioning to gangster capitalism. But he cloaked them as plausible children's stories. His last two films (the ones made in newly-independent Russia - Fatum and this one) even have happy endings that arrive right as the situation appears most bleak. But they're such ridiculously implausible happy endings that the viewer has almost no choice but to notice that they could only happen in cartoons and fairy tales.

This film in particular is about those who do the hard, unglamorous work that keeps the rest of the society from disaster, yet get no thanks (or bread) for what they do. The love and care they show is unrequited. The unstated question is, how long can they keep doing it, and what will happen if they stop? There were many, many such people in newly-independent Russia. They were taken for granted and pushed down, while lavish riches were given to undeserving incompetents and crooks. What makes this particular story a fairy tale is that the little chick never does stop, and the ruthless fox who would tear everything apart turns out to be really nice, actually, and just as willing as the chick is to work for no pay.

One of the YouTube comments says that the moral is that "you can find friends in odd places", but I'm not so sure that that's what most kids watching this would take away from it. Rather, the most memorable thing is the central injustice of the story, which is never resolved... or maybe I'm completely wrong, and they'll focus on the slapstick and fun music and completely miss all of that.

This is by far the darkest film by Leonid Kayukov I've seen so far. All the earlier films by him that I have watched were insanely sweet and child-friendly, while this one is not shy about showing blood and death. The last time I remember hunting being shown so relatively "realistically" in a Soyuzmultfilm production may be all the way back in 1938, in Aleksandr Ivanov's "Fyodor the Hunter" (not on the site yet). But the art style in this is much nicer and really radically different from any previous film by Kayukov, which tended towards the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

In the Perestroika era, artists were more-or-less left to their own devices in the USSR, while still being funded by the state. For some directors, this led to a real flowering as they finally felt bold enough to be more artistically daring, and their films became stronger (e.g. Galina Barinova). Others (e.g. Vladimir Tarasov) abandoned their successful previous artistic directions and began making rather questionable things. Sometimes (let's say, in the case of Aleksandr Petrov, or Robert Saakyants), opinions will differ.

In Leonid Kayukov's case, he seems to have chosen to spend this period making animated films about the natural world. I'm curious to see the others, now.

I've tried to find the textual source of the tale, by the way (by Vasiliy Yuksern), but with no luck.

I'm also not sure about that mask that appears in the beginning of the film. I couldn't find any photo or drawing of any Mari mask that looks like that - it looks rather more like a Native American mask.

A sad yet beautiful story; its ending reminds me of Milovitsa from Belarus. It truly is a masterpiece of Ukrayinian animation.

The sky has been intertwined with humanity since the dawn of history, so it inherently contains many of humanity's irrational aspirations. Each individual tries to send a few dreams, from small to large, into the sky, so the sky and its objects often reflect something in the human psyche. Even I, in any situation, try to photograph the sky, especially the cumulus clouds, as a way to relieve my soul. Each person, depending on their circumstances, easily associates the image of clouds with something they know from their life, but ultimately, it's just imagination; however, that imagination helps to uplift the soul. This story is great because it accurately portrays the psychological development of teenagers through the imagery of clouds. And you, what do you usually think about when you look at clouds?