A fairly by-the-book adaptation of what seems to be a well-known Tajik fairy tale. Mansurhojaev chooses a serious tone, as opposed to the irreverence of his earlier How the Cat Fought the Mice. The art looks nice, and the use of sand is an innovative way to solve an animation problem. The well-known Russian fairy tales got their "classic" animated adaptations in the 1950s, but for the Tajik fairy tales that only began to happen a few decades later. It looks to me like the studio was not trying to push the envelope - but then again, neither was Soyuzmultfilm in the 1950s. It was building the foundation, instead. Unfortunately, Tajik animation didn't get much of a chance to evolve further, as it stopped being funded just a few years later when the USSR collapsed, and the country descended into a brutal civil war.