A pretty epic "music video", this one. The songs are excellently performed (by the Red Army Choir, if I'm not mistaken), and they are dynamically and movingly accompanied by the animation. There's not much of a plot, but it's not aiming at that. Inessa Kovalevskaya never really cared much for the plot in her films, I think - she always put the music and mood above everything. Many of the songs in her films became very famous, though the films themselves aren't always as well remembered (nor were they initially much liked by professional critics, at least before it became obvious just how popular they were).

There are 5 songs included here, though only 4 are actually sung. If you follow all the rabbit holes in learning about them (see the links helpfully included above), you can learn quite a lot about the Russian Civil War. Or just enjoy the wonderful music and pictures.

This was released on DVD a while back on the "Animated Soviet Propaganda" DVD set. The first two songs were fairly well-translated in that release (though they didn't realize that a few of the lines were different compared to the "usual" modern versions of these songs), but the last two (especially the final one) deviated quite a bit more from the actual words. So the translations for those have been changed quite a bit here.

It was purely by chance that I found this film among the restored works, only a pity that most of them are still out of color. In any case, Russian cinema has not disappointed me yet.

Ivan Krylov's story brings back bitter memories to me about two of my old friends. Their problems have only been going on for the past year.

A man named Phú (meaning "rich" in Vietnamese). Last year I was in so much trouble and despair that I invited him out to the iced tea stall and asked for his help. I wanted him to go with me to the HanoiTV to collaborate on translating Russian films, of which I have a lot of translations. However, he refused in a voice and attitude almost like a prince. Even though he was fired from the city portal, he still has a press card and that could help me a little with connecting issues. Imagine that he just woke up that afternoon after playing games, and his clothes and hair were in terrible shape. My other friend and me invited him with all the courtesy of educated people, but he showed us no respect, and even asked us to pay for him before leaving early. It must also be said that at that time he bragged that he had many relationships, but the reality was that he was about to be fired again and had to live off the meager salary of his young wife. About a year later, on the hottest day of summer, he suddenly called me in a superior tone. At that time I was sleeping after staying up all night to work, so I was very tired and irritable. He asked me out to an iced tea stall in a very dirty place. I refused immediately, certainly. Suddenly he asked me to pay him back the debt from when we were students. The amount of money was really not much compared to my ability, however I felt indignant about the way he treated me before. I responded that he should pay me a few hundred US dollars to make up for the meals I had bought him, and then I can pay him back. He couldn't argue with me, so he cursed : "My life met another dog". I immediately replied : "Alright, I am a dog, but my name is preserved forever in the national library ; while death is your end, even your descendants do not want to remember you". That same day, I told another friend : "If he behaved more modestly, even though I had nothing at the moment, I would still try to borrow money from somewhere to help him ; however, with his behavior like that, even if I had a mountain of gold, I still wouldn't give it to him".

"Other friend" named Định (meaning "decide" in Vietnamese). He looks wiser and more elegant than the above mentioned friend. He is a lawyer and has a pretty comfortable life from his job and the support of his family. However, since he is a lawyer, he cannot go too far in that field. He can only be interested in some issues in mainland China and Japan, and is very fond of cars ; other than that, he knows nothing about world politics and cultural issues. It could even be said that he was always prejudiced whenever I mentioned the "West", a term still understood to mean Europe and the US. That's why we're quite different from each other, even though we studied literature together. I always give him moral advice to help him balance between reality and work. For example : One day he was extremely sad because he could not help a client recover a large sum of money (because the defendant had bribed the court) ; I advised him to surprise the client by taking that person out to eat something, and thus help that one get away from despair and start the life over. However, he did not follow and even declared that : I am nothing for him to listen to (although it was good advice). Whenever I sit next to him, I am always struck by the shortsightedness, arrogance and selfishness of an individual who received too much grace but wasted opportunities. Oh yeah, that's why i feel bitter ! Fate is so ironic, like the name of a Soviet drama, when those who know too much receive contempt, while those who know too little always waste everything.

Film based on the same name of an Ukrainian-language children's book by Pavlo Glazovyy, Fedir Makivchuk, Heorhiy Karlov.

I think this is a decent film, with beautiful backgrounds, though the character design is a bit uninspired. Actually, I feel that way about the characters in many of Lev Milchin's films; they tend to be optimized for being simple to animate, but end up a bit lifeless. I do like the style here better than in most of them - it's a bit like the previous "Tsar Saltan" feature that he co-directed with Ivanov-Vano. Though I prefer the earlier 1950 adaption of this story (well, a similar one, though the beginning is different) directed by Olga Hodatayeva: "The Magic Mill".

A charming and inventive film that humanizes the participants of the October Revolution, colored through a child's imagination and misunderstanding of the story he was told (in this, it shares something with the Brumberg sisters' Big Troubles). Only a few years later, filming this sort of script in a newly-independent Ukraine (with a very different official foundational story) would be unthinkable. By the way, I share the child's confusion at the end: why, indeed, could that horse could speak French?

As much as anything, this shows Sivokon's love of little political cartoons (of the sort you'd see in journals and newspapers), and how expressive he could be with very little. Perhaps it also shows why he was able to stay in the Ukrainian animation scene for so long - other more famous directors (such as David Cherkasskiy) relied on their teams and could do nothing when budgets collapsed in the 1990s, but Sivokon needed very little to keep working and was able to just retreat back to his earlier, simpler style (while switching to sand animation to keep costs down even more). Nevertheless, my favourite films by him are the more "lavish" ones he directed in the late 1970s and 1980s.

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I considered it, but they're not THAT necessary, are they? Just to translate the names of the paints (you can already see the colour) and type of paint? But if you have any, I'll add them!

This film is the third or the fourth by the Ukrainfilm studio, and a great improvement over their earlier works. I find it to be the first one of their films that is really worth watching, and not just as a historical curio. The animation is surprisingly detailed and quite entertaining. The propaganda is also kept to a minimum - sure, the message is basically "stay in your lane", and you might argue that it's aimed at leading cultural figures, to encourage them to stay in the USSR where "conditions are good" and not try to flee to the capitalist West where they would "get eaten alive". But there is no overt propaganda, and it's a lesson you could legitimately put into a children's book, anyway. It's a shame that the film was thought lost for so long, and that the colour version didn't survive. It shows Ippolit Lazarchuk as a very talented director whose career was cut off right at the height of his skill (thankfully, he was able to again begin making animation in the 1960s, and those are quite good as well).

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of some analogue in American (or other) animation of the scene with the very tall waves? There's another similar scene in the Soyuzmultfilm cartoon "The Returned Sun", also made in 1936, at 1:45. If I were to guess, were they both inspired by some scene in a Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoon that made its way over there?

This reminds me of certain old Newgrounds Flash cartoons or music videos; there is not much of a story and it sustains itself almost entirely on mood and vibes.

An absolutely bleak film, and one that almost certainly would not have been made by those who lived through it as they would have found focusing on the worst aspects of humanity by those trapped inside the city to be of bad taste, when it is the actions of those who did the RIGHT thing that would be seen as more worth memorializing in art. But once almost 8 decades have passed, people start to be drawn to the more shocking and macabre stories.

The NKVD records on the subject were not released until 2004. What they say is that in the worst period of winter 1941-1942, 100,000 people were dying of starvation per month, with 1.6-2 million people being the final death toll. The first arrests for cannibalism were in Dec 1941, with 9 arrests, and the total was 2105 a year later, with about 5/6 of those being for eating corpses rather than live people. So, ~350 arrests out of a ~3.2 million people city. Most were women, often unsupported women with dependent children, and 90% had minimal education.

The takeaway from the Siege of Leningrad is that in the most unimaginable circumstances, most residents did NOT resort to becoming the lowest savages and preferred to fight or (often) die rather than betray their dignity and values. But of course, there were those of whom that was not true, and that is also a part of history that cannot be erased.