Description:

The tale of two people living across a river who decided to have a senseless fight. Based on the poem by Roman Sef.

Directed by Eduard Belyayev at Saratovtelefilm - a small Saratov-based studio, with an output of 1 stop-motion animation each year. From 1990 onward the team, in which Belyayev was an important art director and later director, developed its own specific kind of flat puppet (in English, "cutout") stop motion animation, with, typically, beautiful use of colour, with this one using water-based paint. Other works of the studio used oil-painted clay reliefs, so were semi-flat puppet animations, or oil-painted 3D clay. For the artists, it was unfortunate that in the years between 1995 and 2005, many Russian animation studios went more-or-less broke. The Russian economy had cold-turkey, switched over to what could be called a Wild West-style capitalist system that forced the studios to work as independent contract companies that had to sell their product to the state TV stations. Yet Russian TV almost didn't buy new animated films anymore, and/or, till about 2011, proved to be unreliable, ordering a number of animated films but in the end not paying for them. Several studios went broke because of this. Many talented animation makers, such as Belyayev, struggled with unemployment, whereas in previous years they had often had steady jobs at the studios and because of that, had been able to produce output like clockwork. Saratovtelefilm went broke a few short years later in 1995.