Description:

Satirical transformations of the popular fairy tale motif about a man who must fly on a giant bird that keeps demanding food until he has to feed it his own flesh.

The film imagines what would happen if the humans were not heroes, but simply out to improve their own lot at any price.

This fairy tale appears in many parts of the world (particularly in Europe and Asia) and is categorized as Thompson_Motif-Index B322.1. In Georgia, it is associated with the Paskunji bird. In southern Russia, with the Mogol bird (as recorded by Afanasiev; see example here, p.108). Unlike what the cartoon suggests, this type of story has never been associated with the Firebird; the Georgians who made the Russian-language version of the film were likely unaware of this, so simply chose the name of the most famous mythological bird from Russian folklore that they knew.