Description:

Two little kittens play with matches and cause a house fire while grandpa cat sleeps. Loosely based on the Russian children's poem.

Though originally in Russian, only the Czech soundtrack has survived. The art style is reminiscent of American animation from earlier in the decade, as was true of many (but not all) Soviet animated films of the late 1930s.

It is based on a simple Russian children's poem about a cat's house on fire that was recorded as early as 1868 (Детские песни, Бессонов Петр Алексеевич, с. 26-27):

Ай дон, дон, дон!
Загорелся кошкин дом:
Бежит курица с ведром,
Заливает кошкин дом.

In the early 20th century, various Russian writers adapted it, including Konstantin Balmont (1905), Pavel Viskovatyy (1915), Samuil Marshak (1922, ill. 1947), Aleksey Mihaylovskiy (1924), V. Denisov (1926, 1927), L. Dligach (1927), Yuriy Vladimirov (written before 1931, published 1941), Sofya Fedorchinko (1943). Many of those versions can be read here. Samuil Marshak's version became the most well-known (and adapted into another cartoon in the 1950s by Lev Atamanov), but this 1938 cartoon seems to have been adapted from Yuriy Vladimirov's version, which was finally published in 1941 with illustrations clearly inspired by this film.

In 2012, some Russians attempted a translation from Czech back into Russian, which was used to create the subtitles. A video with their voice-over and a (inconsistent) colorization can be watched here.