Thanks, Cynir. I didn't realize that this was meant to be a Pushkin adaptation!

Thank Niffiwan so much ! This film reminds me of a terrible situation that is raging all over our beloved planet : Everyone is staring at their iphone screens no matter what. Even though iced tea is my favorite habit, but I often get annoyed when I go to the shop and always have to listen to strange noises from iphones. But let's hear a little more about my current world. Security guard job is considered to be the lowest in my country, what leads to low pay and extremely long hours. That's why it naturally becomes the ideal environment for immoral behavior and the popularity of the iPhone. Oh yes, most (though not all) of those who do this work regularly abuse their iphones to watch junk video clips, gamble, and even fall into scams. Well, could Stanisław Lem have foreseen these things ?

Соловей и роза

Александр Пушкин

В безмолвии садов, весной, во мгле ночей,
Поет над розою восточный соловей.
Но роза милая не чувствует, не внемлет,
И под влюбленный гимн колеблется и дремлет.

Не так ли ты поешь для хладной красоты?
Опомнись, о поэт, к чему стремишься ты?
Она не слушает, не чувствует поэта;
Глядишь, она цветет; взываешь - нет ответа.

The Nightingale and the Rose

Translation by Rupert Moreton

In gardens’ silence, in benighted dark of spring,
Above the rose the nightingale begins to sing.
But, lovely rose hears not, she doesn’t pay attention.
Beneath the amorous hymn she sways in sleep’s descension.
And you, do you not sing to chilly beauty’s doze?
Awake, O bard! What is your quest, do you suppose?
She listens not. She is immune to bard’s attraction;
You gaze, she blossoms; you beseech - there’s no reaction.

Con họa mi và nhành hồng

Thúy Toàn dịch ngữ

Giữa vườn xuân bóng đêm tĩnh mịch,
Con họa mi thánh thót bên nhành hồng
Nhưng đóa hồng kia chẳng chút động lòng
Mà lặng lẽ đung đưa rồi thiếp giấc,
Bản tình ca vẫn du dương réo rắt.

Vì sắc đẹp lạnh lùng ngươi hát làm chi?
Hỡi, thi nhân, hãy mau tỉnh dậy đi!
Uổng công thôi, ngươi nhìn thấy đấy
Nó mơn mởn sắc hương lộng lẫy
Nhưng chẳng chút gì xúc động cảm rung;
Nó làm ngơ chẳng đáp lại tiếng lòng.

This is truly a magnificent work ! I had no idea that in such a short time you all have completed so many subtitles for Pushkin films. For anyone with the slightest aptitude for pedagogy, I believe, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin is a top priority in all matters. I hope that in the future, this trend will be expanded to many other authors. We need to save the world literature that is being degraded by AI.

The art style is a bit ugly, and it's slow to get going, but I did find the idea interesting. I wonder if it should be classed under "Politics"?

This is my favourite part of the trilogy, and probably the most approachable entry-point as well.

The first 10 minutes of the film, especially, are really beautiful and have some amazing animation. Also, it has the most approachable narrative approach of the trilogy, so even those not familiar with Pushkin's life shouldn't get too confused (which you can't really say about the 1st or 3rd films, which are rather introspective).

The original script for this film is not actually from folklore, but fairy tale The Tale of Brave Yatto and His Sister Teune (Сказка о храбром Ятто и его сестре Тэюнэ) by Zhanna Vitenzon. She rewrote a classical motif of the Neney people. Neney (ненэй) means "human", which is the same as Nanay (нанай). Therefore, perhaps the ancestors of the Neney people lived in Northeast China before migrating to the cold Arctic. There are two things to reinforce this point :

The names of all the peoples who settled around the Pacific Ocean actually refer only to element "human". Example : Han (Chinese), Hmoob (Hmong), Kadai (Thai)... Even the word "viet" in "Vietnam" is probably a variation of a word meaning "human".

The Deer with the Golden Antlers was the patron saint of all Tungusic peoples, including the ethnic group who gave birth to the Qing dynasty. He is probably a North Asian version of the sun god.

This story used to be very popular in Vietnam and it reminds me of an unforgettable memory. In a science show (KCT = khoa học-công nghệ-thông tin = science-technology-information) aired around 1994, a professor raised the following question : Two children set out to save their mother who was kidnapped by the Snow Queen, so she agreed to release the mother on one condition, that, the children had to make the needle float on the water. In the next week's program, the group of students answered that the kids just needed to attach the needle to the paper. The reason I remember it so well is because at the end of the show there was the witch's evil laugh, which was created by an actress. I really lost sleep for several nights because of fear.

The film is a true reflection of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, which is often considered Russian people's most prosperous period of the 20th century, or even since the early 19th century. When you have little to worry about in terms of material things, the only thing you have to do is... contemplate and imagine. But I think that this is the reason for the collapse of the Soviet regime. Because when people lose the habit of working, illusions begin to invade their souls. They gradually become lazy and life begins to seem meaningless. I know that around 1989, a Soviet leader went to Singapore to ask for a loan of 50 million USD to save the economy, but Mr. Lee Kuan Yew refused. So, as we know, the Soviet regime collapsed in the next two years.

In fact, the wealth of the Soviet Union and the prosperity of the communist bloc created illusions for Vietnamese society from the 1970s until about 1988. When this film was made, Vietnam had just been reunified. The South Vietnamese economy, although stagnant since late 1974, still contributed to the hope of most Vietnamese, especially those in the North. My maternal grandfather, my mother and an [elder] aunt-in-law took the (~2000km) train from the poor North to the Mekong Delta to buy rice as early as 1976. This was of course extraordinary given the circumstances of Korea or Vietnam itself before 1975. Images of trains or buses packed with people were very familiar at that time. Israel-style agriculture combined with a capitalist economy has kept South Vietnam among the Asian economic tigers. Although the North Vietnamese government tried to propagate its evils, in reality, it was the North cadres who were seduced by it. It is a fact that the disease of delusion "killed" the entire generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. They were arrogant, shameless, cowardly, lazy, depraved... which were the vices described in contemporary literature. The media at that time continuously "sang" the refrain of proletarian friendship, the victory of communism over capitalist forces or the day of advancing to a communist society not far away : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. However, after Perestroyka, no one cared about those things anymore. Take the Soviet-Vietnam relationship for example : In 1975, the Vietnamese government used a special plane to secretly transport 17 tons of gold from the South Vietnamese treasury to the Soviet Union to pay off its debt. This event was only revealed by Frank Snepp in the 2010s, although before that, public opinion believed that President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu had stolen. Of course, because of arrogance, at that time the Soviet government converted those 17 tons of gold into flour and books to aid Vietnam. But in 1988, when the economy began to collapse, the Soviet Union asked Vietnam to pay its debt, and Vietnam immediately demanded that the Soviet Union pay back the land rent for the embassy in Hanoi (previously, out of friendship or... arrogance, this amount was consistently zero).

That dispute actually froze Soviet-Vietnamese relations. After the Russian government was established, Vietnam agreed to pay its debt in oil and gas, that is, the Vietsovpetro joint venture was responsible for exploiting oil and gas in the East Sea of ​​Vietnam to supply to Russia, with only a small part being kept. Russia was responsible for training Vietnamese technicians and sending people to maintain equipment, even providing helicopters. My generation benefited from the fruits of this cooperation, as Russian films shown on the central television throughout the 1990s were free and plentiful, and at the same time, gasoline prices in Vietnam at that time were extremely affordable. I still think that a few delusional people won't be a problem, but if the majority are like that, it's definitely a disaster.

This is the comic version of the short story : EN & RU.

Some of the same sense of timing and movement as in Tatarskiy's earlier films, but here the effect is more horrifying rather than funny. Tatarskiy had never done a film like this before, though some of the other directors at Pilot had. Notably, his once close collaborator Igor Kovalyov, back in 1989. The surreal portrayal of the desires of the living affecting the inanimate, in particular, is very much something that Kovalyov liked to do, while some of the sense of environmental "wrongness" remind me of Svislotskiy's Hypnerotomachia.

This actually seems like the sort of film that many other directors (such as Robert Saakyants) started making starting around the late 1980s (a decade earlier among the Estonians), so Tatarskiy was rather late to it. He was initially very optimistic about the changes in the country, so perhaps it took a decade longer to hit him? This was shortly after the 1998 economic collapse, and after several calamities befell his unfinished feature film project, so he must have been feeling pretty down.

But it is very strange that this was to be his final solo film. His next ones were all co-directed with Telegin and don't really feel like Tatarskiy to me, with "Interpretation of Dreams" being a partial exception.

Perhaps it was also his last that was traditionally-animated (I'm not sure about "The Red Gate of Rashomon").