Description:

А smart servant asks in name of his master for the hand of a beautiful princess, for which he has to fulfill 3 tasks. Based on a Czech fairy tale (retold in the Russian language by K. Pautovsky).

Lidia started to work for Ekran in 1966, 3 years before it was founded. Ekran is the animation studio for Russian TV, but Russian TV already broadcast & recorded TV studio-filmed puppet plays, and Lidia's task was to stage them first as assistant director, and later as director. But she was educated as a theatre director, specialized in Puppet theater. This was a specialized study that she undertook (part time) 1967-1975.

In the first year of Ekran (1970), only filmed puppet plays were made. An experienced director from Soyuzmultfilm, Dmitriy Babichenko, was appointed as manager/director of Ekran (which is actually short for Creative Association for TV-screen) in 1969. So it was actually a group of animation makers facilitated by a TV organisation which was led by a sort of primos inter pares director/manager who was also a film director. Babichenko filmed a small staged puppet-play, too (Cautious Goats, 1972). Ekran at first was meant to be a mixed studio for puppets plays, puppet films and other animation. Babichenko decided to phase out puppet-plays, but Lidiya was still in the higher courses of the theater school - she graduated in 1975, but she was not trained as film director, though she had a steady job there since 1966. So the old Soyuzmultfilm trick was employed: she was coupled with an animation film director. First with Yuriy Klepatskiy for a 3-part cutout animation series Uncle Fyodor (1975/6), then in 1977 she made her last puppet-play film at Ekran on her own (which she was fully qualified for then), and then in 1978 she was coupled with Leonid Aristov, the old master who trained all the puppet film makers at Ekran 73-76, and in Goldilocks you then see the merging of the two arts. The puppets in many ways are theatre puppets, the staging has lots of aspects of theatre staging, and throughout her career one can often see that theater influence. Lidia also made the last Ekran animation, Boyka wouldn't hurt a fly No.6, which is being translated at the moment. As an employee in full employment at the TV Studio, she had protected employee status, so she was legally employed until 1996 (when she could legally retire after 30 years of service), while most employees at Ekran were let go in 1993.

-Film notes by Eus347, lightly edited