Description:

After visiting a zoo, a boy meets Crocodile Crocodilovich from Chukovsky's famous children's poem, who asks to be taken back to his Arican homeland. The first Soviet children's cartoon.

The first video above is the longest version currently available (22:08), while the second one is a shorter version (12:50). The longer version is missing a few intertitles present in the shorter one, and others are only a single frame long. This has been corrected in the subtitles.

The crocodile comes from Chukovsky's popular 1917 poem, although otherwise the plot is entirely original. The original poem can be read here; English translations were made by Babette Deutsch in 1931 and by Richard Coe in 1964.

The film was directed and animated by the animation team at Mezhrabpom-Rus: Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Yuriy Merkulov, Daniil Cherkes, written by Daniil Cherkes, Ya. Urinov. The studio focused largely on educative or informative animation, but this time the studio director asked them to make an animated children's film - the first in Soviet film history, though it was shortly followed by several more. Moreover, he said that it had to have a mix of live action and animation (by which he hoped to make their task easier, though in fact it only made it more difficult). The first five minutes of the film are entirely live action, as are the final two. As Ivanov-Vano wrote in his 1984 book Kadr za kadrom, despite the film's many flaws stemming from the creators' inexperience, it was in fact quite popular among Soviet children once it was released.

The influence of the childrens' book writer Kornei Chukovsky on the development of Soviet children's animation cannot be overestimated. Many of the early Soviet animated films for children adapted his poems, and were quite popular, though not all of them survive. But also, consider Crocodile Gena of what is likely the best-known Soviet puppet animation series, Cheburashka. Would it have been a crocodile without Chukovsky's obsession with crocodiles in his earlier stories?