Vladimir Petkevich's later films, like this one, seem to not get nearly the attention of his early ones (from the 1980s and 1990s), so I thought I'd partly correct this by subtitling one of them, as his filmography shows an interesting artistic progression. A rare example of an artist going the other way from arty to conventional. Petkevich repudiated his earlier sophisticated, dreamy, avant garde style and decided to make films that are more mainstream:

"I long ago forever gave up on arthouse films. Sorry, but arthouse is made for fools and critics. I have no desire to do it. When I make films for children, these family films, it is a chance to help someone."

Despite this, it's his earlier films that always get written about, when they are noticed at all. And for myself, too, it's the earlier films that I remember and love. His later films, like this one, tend to be well-made... but they feel like most of the sharp edges are smoothed over. For example, there's a part in this film where the old couple have gotten rich, and the old lady puts the hen that gave them their wealth in a gilded cage. It seems that this thoughtless act of cruelty (which was foreshadowed earlier when the old woman gave the hen only a small treat) should be a turning point in the story. Instead, it really doesn't change much. The hen seems a bit disappointed, but is made happy again when the cat brings the gramophone closer to her.

The end result is a film that is well-made and full of rich, little details, but inoffensive and not very memorable.

In his book "The Masters of Short-form Animation", Aleksey Surtayev has a chapter about Petkevich in which he makes the same point:

A sad paradoxical situation has arisen: having reoriented himself toward the mass audience, Vladimir Petkevich has failed to attract that very audience. The works of the Belarusian animator can be viewed at festivals and on the internet. Here is what the director says in an interview: "It is not commercially viable for cinemas to show our cartoons, and television is not interested in them either. We show them at festivals, win awards, but what's the point? The cartoons gather dust on the shelves and, in essence, become useless to anyone. At the same time, attempts to post the works on the internet are categorically suppressed. But I'm not against it at all, let the kids watch them somewhere... But in the end, it turns out that we are doing all this huge work just for the sake of ticking boxes."

>>4
>I was looking for more info of the director but couldn't find more stuff more than his profile on animator.rus
If you can read Russian or Azeri, there's some info to be found in the 2018 book Azerbaijani Animation. After reading that, I added Aganagi Axundov as co-director and updated the description, although he was left out of the film's credits.

>>2
>There was one Azeri animated film made in 1965, available on YouTube.
Do you have a name or a link?

According to this article there was one made at Azerbaijantelefilm in that year called "Talking Lights" (Говорящие огоньки), which is confirmed on p.20-21 of the book Azerbaijani Animation (2018) (unfortunately, only 200 copies of it seem to have been printed and I can't find it anywhere, although some scanned pages can be read on Google Books).

I can't find that film on YouTube, though.

Sometimes this series would feature new directors who then didn't go on to direct anything else of note. This is the case for Orlova and Bogomolova, directors of the first one - they were animators before and they went back to being animators after (although Orlova briefly returned to directing in 1994). I can't say that their film stands out all that much.

The next one, by Galina Barinova, is a short and low-effort entry, as are most of hers at this time (her best period began about a decade later).

Finally, the one by Garri Bardin - his second film. He came to the studio as a voice actor in 1973, and directed his first film in 1975, which caused (in Bardin's words) a lot of resentment from others at the studio as he was perceived as being an outsider who had "jumped the line". This has an early example something that would become common in Bardin's later films - noticing and capturing some ugly aspect of human nature, and encouraging (directly or not) the viewers to do better. This sometimes led to beautiful and sublime films such as Adagio, but not always! Sometimes, I think it's the director's distaste and bitterness for people around him that come through stronger.

I have mixed feelings about this one. The only time I've ever seen someone tying a tin can to an animal's leg is in this cartoon - I don't think it was especially common, at least not in my neighborhood. By showing this ugly behaviour in detail in the first place, the cartoon also teaches kids that this is something that you can do, even though the boy is sorry at the end. I suppose I also didn't find that ending too believable - it's too saccharine. On the other hand, I like the art style and the "play" aspect of a battle in which the two sides transform into various creatures. This sort of "duel" has also appeared in a few other films in this series: "Mosaic" from #1, "The Game" from #16 and "Who Was First?" in #27 (not on the site yet).

>>4
>But this dub, which was made by DEFA, is currently lost
Interesting. It wasn't even that long ago. I bet it'll be found one day when there is the will to find it. Just like those early Ukrainian animations from the 1930s (1, 2) that had long been thought lost in WW2 were suddenly discovered by DEFA in their archives in the last few years...

A sweet and well-done children's film about how one can make friends even far away from home. It also shows a little of various parts of the world and what polar explorers do. It's quite pretty to look at. This is cutout animation, but animated in such a smooth way that you can barely tell. E.g. to animate talking, the head is replaced with each frame, so that it looks very smooth. This way, they could use each type of animation ("moving existing shapes" or "redrawing") for the types of movement that it is best suited for.

They do something similar in many American stop-motion puppet movies today, by 3D-printing many different heads and replacing the character's head for each frame, so that it ends up looking like CGI (e.g. in "Corpse Bride" or "Coraline"). In this case, it looks like a children's illustrated story book come to life. They also used this type of mixed cutout-cel animation at Ekran studio in those years, but seemingly not so much at Soyuzmultfilm.

This film apparently also had a german dub made, according to this: (https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/taina-tretej-planetu/) But this dub, which was made by DEFA, is currently lost

>>1
There was earlier surviving animation in Azerbaijan: There was one Azeri animated film made in 1965, available on YouTube.

A fairly by-the-book adaptation of what seems to be a well-known Tajik fairy tale. Mansurhojaev chooses a serious tone, as opposed to the irreverence of his earlier How the Cat Fought the Mice. The art looks nice, and the use of sand is an innovative way to solve an animation problem. The well-known Russian fairy tales got their "classic" animated adaptations in the 1950s, but for the Tajik fairy tales that only began to happen a few decades later. It looks to me like the studio was not trying to push the envelope - but then again, neither was Soyuzmultfilm in the 1950s. It was building the foundation, instead. Unfortunately, Tajik animation didn't get much of a chance to evolve further, as it stopped being funded just a few years later when the USSR collapsed, and the country descended into a brutal civil war.

Thanks for the interesting context, Cynir.
>Perhaps the president of Tajikistan was also once a boy who loved this animated film ?
Unlikely, considering he was born in 1952, so would have been 35 when this was released.

For my part, I think this film is overly-ambitious for the short running time and feels rushed. That said, there are some unforgettable scenes in there, so it does succeed perhaps the most important way.