An odd little film by Riho Unt and Hardi Volmer, the first of a number of films they made together. An awkward member of the tribe who can't quite do things that come naturally to the others becomes the only one able to do battle on their behalf and defeat a calamity that comes upon them. Once the crisis has been averted, however, he finds himself just as unable to adapt to "normality" as he was before.

I've been unable to find anything about the Chukchi fairy tale that this is supposedly based on. Even the name "Kohmits" doesn't help.

The design of the puppets is clever - but perhaps the film is in love with it a bit too much. It feels like the directors were experimenting and having fun, with the story more of an afterthought.

«Расскажи сказку. Лиса, заяц и петух». Издательство Малыш, Москва, 1984.

I am very sorry. After adding it I realized my mistake.

The current war has actually done one good thing : It has awakened the Ukrainian people. Now they could speak their own voice about cultural identity, instead of having to hide under the shadow of the Soviet Union.

>>9
Good news! Hope we get to see it.
The links say that they made 3 versions - Old Russian (the original language it was written in), Russian and Ukrainian. I hope the Old Russian one shows up too, at some point.

P.S. To support the point I made in my previous long post, "Old Russian" is more commonly called "Old East Slavic" in English these days, but in that Ukrainian article the term used for that ancestor language (of which a close relative is still spoken in the church) is precisely "Old Russian". On the other hand, the term for the modern Russian language in that article is "Rosiysky", which comes from the word that refers specifically to the Russian state, rather than the Russian people. A bit like how some British folks call the language spoken in America "American" - though that's usually said in jest rather than in seriousness.

Знайдено український варіант анімаційного фільму «Сказання про Ігорів похід» 1972 року
Знайдено українську версію анімаційної стрічки за мотивами «Слова о полку Ігоревім»

A charming film, and I think one of Viken's best. I love the late 1980s/early 1990s trend in certain circles of the Soviet & post-Soviet animation world to have the camera be constantly moving, and have as much of the image be redrawn frame-by-frame as possible. It would be interesting to track the influence of this style - when and where it first started getting popular. I can't remember where I read it, but one film critic considered it one of the key trends in Perestroika/early 1990s Russian and Ukrainian animation, and it was a deliberate artistic choice. Perhaps it began at Kievnauchfilm, where the popular films of David Cherkasskiy mixed cutout animation with short dynamic interludes of cel animation in which the perspectives were exaggerated and the camera was always moving. And maybe later, some directors liked what they saw so much that they made it a centrepiece of their style.

Other examples include The Box of Pencil Crayons (1985) by Vladlen Barbe, Looking-Rhymes (1988) by Roze Stiebra, 9 1/2 Minutes (1993) by Sergey Kushnerov, the whole filmography of Yelena Gavrilko, many of the solo films of Rozaliya Zelma (maybe not so much in the camera work, but certainly in being unafraid to use coloured pencils), many of the early films of Pilot Studio and Tatarskiy (particularly an infamous epic scene in his unfinished feature film, "Train Arrival"). And I'm sure I'm still missing a ton of examples.

Faint echoes made their way into the productions by American studio Klasky Csupo. Perhaps a contemporary example in the West were the films of American Bill Plympton, certain scenes in films by Richard Williams, or British director Joanna Quinn (e.g. her excellent Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (2006)).

It was kind of like an echo and further development of the ideas of early 1930s American animation, especially Fleischer Studios and Disney (Disney insisted that all of the characters on screen had to constantly be moving, although the camera still usually stayed in one place). The "limited animation" movement of the 1950s/1960s was a reaction against the Disney style, and it had fans in the USSR as well. But by the 1980s/1990s, the pendulum in the USSR had well and truly swung back quite strongly.

As far as I can tell, this style died away with the advent of computer animation, replaced more and more with digital cutouts that were simpler and cheaper to move around (though at the cost of looking lifeless).

P.S. Apologies for the lack of site updates lately. I'm prioritizing working on the site infrastructure.

This cartoon is almost like the 4th-part or new version of the Masha series (1977‒1979) about poetics. The image of the cucumber horse is quite similar to the pillow (1st p.) and the jam bottle (3rd p.).

This film reminds me of the style of Vietnamese animation before 1990. They often have simple content with drawings that evoke the lives of farmers. However in the case of this film, I think the Kyiv artists were actually trained in Moskva not so long before that they were not yet able to create their own character like in the Brezhnev period.

In between "Nu pogodi" 8 & 9, Kotyonochkin made this rather less well-known cartoon featuring a rather similar hare and a similar rock-loving hooligan (but a fox this time, not a wolf). It is probably about as good... I guess? But just with less iconic characters. Although many of their mannerisms are the same. I was amused by the parody of a rock song in the middle, with the fox singing complete nonsense English and his girlfriend being absolutely won over by the display.