Milchin was a well-liked director, but I admittedly don't like many of his films all that much. In this one, nothing bad happens to anyone, which gives it a sort of overly-sugary feeling. It's nice that the boy returned the umbrella to its owner at the end, but he should have done that to begin with, even if that downpour of rain at the end seems to have been, like many things in the film, entirely imaginary (since the old lady isn't wet at all when the umbrella is returned to her). It feels like there's supposed to be some vague lesson here; the boy feels guilty and heads off to return the umbrella at one point... but apparently he could have just safely kept on playing. There's no real human interaction between the boy and anyone - he's daydreaming and playing by himself for basically the entire film.

On the other hand, animation film critic Sergey Aseninin his 1971 book "Magicians of the Screen" (Волшебники экрана) has only nice things to say about this one (on pp. 208-209), calling it an example of Romanticism in children's animation, and praising the "clarity and precision of its visual language". He's especially fond of the part at the end where the boy boldly walks through the rain under the magical umbrella that hovers above him, with more and more wet toys joining his march. I like admittedly like that scene as well. Although while watching it, I was also thinking "stop getting distracted already, return the umbrella to the old lady who is probably getting wet!"

A quirky, visually inventive animated film, or the sort that started becoming popular for artists to make in the USSR in the 1980s. According to Gorlenko's interview in Sergey Kapkov's book "The Legends of Soyuzmultfilm" (which can also be read here), he tried to tell this story without words, but in his opinion he failed, and the mouse's lesson doesn't come across visually. I thought it was perfectly understandable when I watched it for the first time, though. There's a nice scene at 8:57, in which you can see the entire "circle of kindness", that hammers the lesson home.

>>1
even the background music can sometimes be good

Bardin's first film (as director) is not very well known - in fact, I think this is the first time it has been subtitled. There's nothing especially wrong with it - it's a decently charming story aimed at little children, and the art direction is nice. But it doesn't really stand out, either. Maybe this is partly because it lacks any memorable songs or melodies; the music is mostly just really these occasional strange, discordant fragments of notes played on a synthesizer. I suppose it's meant to sound spacey.

The concepts of stars, space travel and cosmonauts are heavily simplified and little-kid-ified. This is also true for the most famous animated Soviet sci-fi, The Secret of the Third Planet (1981), whose story has birds that can fly between the stars, but it's even more the case here. I mean, the cosmonaut literally travels with his rocket (which is just slightly bigger than him) on a little dolly cart!

The translation wasn't especially hard, but it did have a few tricky bits. One of them comes at 3:47, in which the street sweeper says a common little rhyme "Что упало, то пропало" (literally "What falls down is lost (done for)", which means something like "You can't unscramble an egg"). I couldn't think of a good fit in English, so ultimately chose "What falls to the street is mine to sweep". At 4:16, the kids visit the Repair Bureau - these were state-run "service centers" to which one could take broken items (such as electronics, etc.) to be repaired. There was and is no exact Western equivalent, so I just hope the meaning is clear enough. At 7:10, one little kid's suggestion to "divide it up" - in English, one usually says "to share" in a similar context. But in this case, that didn't really work and I had to use the less common phrasing.

I'm not sure, but this is probably my favourite of the 7 short films that Bardin's made since his animated feature The Ugly Duckling in 2010. In a way, it might also be the hardest thing that he's attempted in that time, because he here is trying to pair a very gentle, heavenly almost ethereal music and painting with a down-to-earth animation technique to which those traits don't come very easily. The smallest wrong gesture, and you have a false note. Bardin himself (in the first interview linked in the description) admitted that he was scared to begin, but was so inspired by the music that he pushed through that fear. Generally speaking, I think he and his team managed quite well. Although I'm not sure that the water droplets near the end were best made in 3D - maybe having them painted on top (like they used to do in the 1980s) would have looked better.

This seems to have been a very turbulent production, with the entire studio production team leaving at one point. I'm not quite sure what happened after that and how the film ultimately got finished. Nor can I find out whether the film won any festival awards.

I recently realized (due to Georgiy Borodin's series of posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that this Sept. 11 had been Garri Bardin's 85th birthday, so I thought I'd add a number of his films that are not on the site yet. Starting with his most recent, released just a few months ago. His first was in 1975 (which I'll also try and subtitle soon), so at this point Bardin's career as director is one of the longest in Russian animation: 51 years, second only (I think) to the 57-year-long career of the Soviet animation patriarch, Ivan Ivanov-Vano.

Bardin started as a director of Soviet children's cartoons that were very much in the mainstream and didn't really stand out (positively or negatively). He had an early hit with The Flying Ship (1979), largely due to its catchy songs written by Yuriy Entin (who was responsible for a huge number of the well-known songs in Soviet animation). In 1983, he discovered stop motion animation, realized that he felt much more comfortable in it and never went back to 2D animation again. He also started winning awards at international film festivals around this time. His best period was probably in the 1990s and 2000s, when he got universal popular acclaim with the fun and kid-friendly Chucha trilogy as well as universal critical acclaim with the somber and serious Adagio. He spent the next 6 years working on an ambitious animated feature, The Ugly Duckling. It did poorly in Russian theatres, and public opinion was divided, though it did get some critical acclaim as well. After that, Bardin never attempted anything so ambitious again, but managed to continue making smaller films by becoming an expert at crowdfunding on planeta.ru (a bit like the Russian equivalent to Kickstarter). Bardin is one of the very few, or even the only, currently working animation directors in Russia who started working in the Soviet era yet are not funded by the government.

Like most of his recent films, this is a parable set to classical music. I think that it was also designed to be relatively simple to make and animate. Despite how simple and kind of abstract it is, I think it's nice. I like it more than his previous film. It could be read as a political commentary (due to the title and choice of music), but could just as easily be read as a universal message of what a man tends to encounter as he travels through life (though in that case, perhaps he should have started as a child and gradually become older throughout the film). Is what happens at the end really a solution though, or only an illusory solution? And if it's the latter, maybe it's good enough even so? In that sense, the message seems similar to me to the one in Stanislav Sokolov's animated feature Hoffmaniada (which is one of my favourite films of post-Soviet Russian animation, though I didn't initially think I would like it).

The one major thing I didn't like is that the credits at the beginning are very long and totally silent. They should have recorded the orchestra warming up and used that during the first 85 seconds.

As for the subtitles, I simply added them to translate the parts of the credits that are not already translated to English. The film itself is wordless.

A charming and magical, though slow-paced, cartoon for children. The characters are brothers who love each other and go on an adventure without the parents around.
Grachyova came back to the little bear character a number of times in her long career. Most of them are not on the site yet. Both the Russian and the Ukrainian voice actors did a nice job and I don't have a preference there, but the Ukrainian version has been scanned in nicer quality.

Probably my favourite of the films by Yuriy Butyrin that I've seen so far. Clever premise, and well-done execution. Thematically, reminded me a bit of Koshkin's Two Hands (1990), in that they both feature a boy with a grandmother who wishes he didn't have to do housework. And of course, even more recently, Pixar's 2008 animated feature "WALL-E".

Some Russian-language reviews of it can be found on irecommend.ru (also: kino-teatr.ru, otzovik.com, ivi.tv). I especially liked this one by Лариса111, which talks about the cartoon through the lens of the conflict between technological progress (including the current AI revolution) and the value humans derive from work.

By the way, the scene at 7:35, where the boy is traveling through a tunnel, is a reference to the similar scene in The Post (1929). And at 2:50, there are some vintage 1980s Soviet game arcade machines.

The film was hard-subbed by Zhurka75 back in 2013, but quite badly. I revised almost every line of that translation. Some things are impossible to get across in English, even so. Because Russian lacks articles such as "a, the", when the robot tells the boy "you will be like the Great Dontwanter", it is not quite clear whether he is saying "a great Dontwanter" (that is, that the boy will act like an excellent citizen of the land of Dontwanna) or "the Great Dontwanter" (that is, that the boy will follow the path of an actual existing person who is named that). The ambiguity is resolved only when the Great Dontwanter himself shows up. Unfortunately, there was no way to really do the same thing in English without being ungrammatical.

I think that this cartoon is excellent, and has some of the best traits of "mainstream" Soviet animation at the time (such as the Prostokvashino series). It has likeable (and well-animated) characters, and a kind and well-written story. Until just 2020, it wasn't even on the internet anywhere, and this HD video surfaced even more recently.

I want to thank Cynir very much for making Russian & English subtitles earlier this year. Only now did I get around to checking and correcting them.

A serious parable, like most of Tulyahodzhayev's films that I have seen so far. The illustrations are nice, but there is very little movement/animation (to save cost, no doubt). The way the main character is drawn reminds me of something I've seen somewhere, but I can't place it. Maybe some carvings on the walls of some Hindu temple?

The difficulty with the translation was getting it to rhyme and have the # of syllables match while keeping the meaning close. I think I managed it, mostly...

Tulyahodzhayev is mostly known for his famous There Will Come Soft Rains (1984), but in fact made films from 1979 to 2017. After the Soviet period, they were all in Uzbek and circulated only within the country, so it is harder to access them. In his filmography, though (see Wikipedia) there are a few notable gaps: 1993-1996 (which I assume had to do with the economic crisis of the time due to the USSR's collapse), and 2003-2005. The latter has to do with his (any many of his colleagues') conflict with Murad Muhammad-Dost, who was head of Uzbekkino at the time. In despair, Tulyahodzhayev wrote an article denouncing him in Mar 2004. Shortly after, he left Uzbekistan for Slovakia and traveled across Europe. In Sep 2005, he returned to Uzbekistan after Muhammad-Dost left his position, and resumed making films, starting with Bird (2006).