Description:

A Bear grandfather wants his grandson to stay at home in winter and sleep, but his friends urge him to come out and go skating with them... which he still has to learn.

Propagating sport and athleticism was a typical communist theme in the Stalinist 1950s. Ivanov's way of depicting animals had been threatened at the end of the 1940s in Soyuzmultfilm's artistic council because of showing foreign (Disney) influences. In his previous film "Polkan and Shavka", he'd had to use a realistic animation style despite his inclination otherwise. Through the intervention of Ivan Aksenchuk, whose wife worked at a library containing foreign film magazines, it could be demonstrated that the work of the party-representatives inside Soyuzmultfilm also showed foreign "Disney" influences, so the threat that the group around Aleksandr Ivanov would be cancelled (because of showing foreign interest and no socialist realism) was abated, and the animation style, beloved by the studio's star animator Boris Dyozhkin (who worked on this film and soon became a director himself), was saved.