From 1954-1961, Grigoriy Lomidze made a number of puppet films at Soyuzmultfilm that were mostly live action puppet theatre, with only a little bit of animation when it was absolutely unavoidable. He seems to have been the only director at the studio who chose to work this way. Compared to At a Summer Villa, which he had made the year before, the puppets in this one are a lot less expressive - their eyes and mouths don't really move. The script is basically fine, but the lack of expressive animation (or expressive live action puppetry) makes the way it is told too stiff for me. The limits of this approach are more obvious here than they were in his previous film, which probably even benefited from it.