A film from the perspective of a young woman (Ruditskaya was 28 years old when she directed this) about a typical day and a missed connection, but she finds beauty in her life despite that. "I didn't really need it all that much, it's his loss more than mine", she seems to be saying. The city happens to be Seoul simply because it was commissioned by a Seoul animation festival.

Visually, a good example of the kind of thing that I've noticed from many students of the HSE Art and Design School - bold design choices that require original approaches to animation and movement, quite far from realism. Also, since these are young students, many of them bring their own lives into the plots of their films. I personally couldn't relate to this one and even found it vaguely distasteful, despite appreciating the art style.

The YouTube description says that it wasn't accepted to any film festivals, with the implication that it was because of political reasons. I think that could well be part of the reason, since the Israeli cause is currently rather controversial, to put it mildly. But part of it could be that it's a very simple film that simplifies a rather complex issue. Of course, you could say that the whole job description of art (or at least, a certain kind of art) is to simplify complex issues, but perhaps this particular simplification simply didn't resonate with any of the film festival curators, and even Bardin's name was not enough to overcome that.

It also requires some familiarity with history and cultural traditions that not everybody has.

Maybe you'd want to add the subs.

Very, very sweet and child-friendly, this one. Although I find the randomness doesn't hold my interest after a while. I think it helps if you know the original fairy tales.

I find Pavlenko's films (what I’ve seen of them so far) to be very hit-or-miss. Some are quite interesting, others I would rather not have seen.

This film of Bardin's has only just been made available online (published on Soyuzmultfilm's YouTube and VK channels, of all places - this marks his first time working together with Soyuzmultfilm since 1990, I believe), although he's made two more since then - "Ave Maria" (funded 2021, finished 2023) and "Everlasting Lament" (funded and finished 2024) - and is in middle of crowdfunding another one (Russian Waltz). I think all of Bardin's films since his 2010 feature "The Ugly Duckling" seem to have roughly the same scaffolding: take one or several pieces of famous classical music, take some sort of didactic message formed from Bardin's impressions of the society around him, and play it out wordlessly using puppet animation closely synchronized to the music. Actually, I would even say that he's been doing that since the 1990s, but there used to be more other elements involved, more attention to character and story, to the joy of movement and art, and I think it led to some of his best work (1990s-2000s). Whereas his more recent productions have become more spartan, more focused... but also more artificial-feeling as a result, almost more akin to student films. I watched this and thought near the beginning "kids don't play like that - sitting symmetrically on either side and robotically putting sand into their buckets". But being in time to the music seemed to be more important than having characters act realistically. To compare, his earlier film Chucha 3 (2004) also had a little boy whose movements were closely timed to the music, sometimes a bit artificially, yet the final effect was more natural and heartfelt.

The final didactic message is that "normal", "rich" and "poor/criminal" elements of society should cooperate in order to all be collectively better off.

A sweet cartoon for really little kids. I must say, the new restoration makes it look really stunning - the beauty of this more "modernist" 1960s art style really shines. This was made in the fifth year of the "rebirth" of Ukrainian animation, after being suspended in the late 1930s. Effectively, this means that unlike Russian and Georgian and even Armenian animation (which had animation studios through this period, though barely so in Armenia's case), Ukrainian animation never went through any sort of "socialist realist" phase.

I find Golovanova's cartoons of the 1980s to have a really beautiful, fluid animation style, with pretty interesting screenplays as well. My favourite is still "Sweet Porridge", but I really liked this one as well. There hasn't been much commentary about it, but I liked the review by Alessandro Criscitiello that I found on LetterboxD:
"Facing loneliness together through a surreal, melancholic and virtually endless circus act. Beautiful. I'd never stop watching it."

The screenplay here feels very sparse to fill up a whole 10 minutes, so there are a lot of antics that seem to be there simply to fill time. I like the 1947 cartoon much better (though it, too, feels a bit overlong in the first half).

It's unfortunate that the video quality is so poor, because it hides quite a good film with excellent modernist art direction and great animation (very likely inspired by Fyodor Hitruk's The Story of a Crime from 2 years earlier). It also gives a good look at typical domestic life of the time.