5 minutes, 5 maritime safety skits. The animation is very well done and the writing is funny. Animator.ru lists this as the first film of Aleksey Karayev, but I don't know - they don't have a full filmography. Karayev created some of my favourite Russian animated films in the mid-1980s("Welcome" and "Lodgers of an Old House"). But he did these commissions for a bit at the beginning. They are generally pretty well done. He took a break from directing in the 1990s, coming back in the early 2000s, but I haven't liked his later films as much.

A fun little tale with some stylish animation. The director's first film. Her website says that she studied at the Animation Department at the Ural State Architecture and Arts Academy, and she thanks the other students from there in the credits, as well as Aleksey Karayev, a well-known Ural-based animation director who is a professor in the same Academy. So I suppose that the Pchela studio and this Academy collaborated, though only Pchela is listed as the studio.

There has been a trend in Russian animation schools, including in the Urals, of encouraging students to make work that will play well with international audiences (so: wordless, with an English title/credits, and maybe avoiding themes that are too "local"). I guess the hope is to have their students' work be seen in a larger pond, and to increase the chances for the students to get hired abroad. It worked for Chernysheva, as she now lives in France, and was even granted residency in Japan for a time.

This is one of Kovalevskaya's series of cartoons without words based on famous works of Russian classical music composers. She directed these periodically from 1976 to 1993. Like a lot of them, I'm a bit conflicted about this one because it mixes elements I like with others I like less. I often like Kovalevskaya's musical selections, but I don't like her nearly as much as a director. The musical performances are always excellent, since they were recorded by world-class orchestras and conductors. As is also nearly always the case, there isn't much depth or story, but what there is could work well enough if carried along by well-executed mood and movement. I guess, in the end, it works more than it doesn't, despite the backgrounds being drawn in a completely different style than the characters (also true of Kovalevskaya's most famous film, The Bremen Town Musicians).

Inessa Kovalevskaya's last film after being a regular director at Soyuzmultfilm since 1965, although she did come out of retirement to make one more film in 2001. Like the tendency of most of her films, it is based heavily around one or several musical themes, story is very slight, and there isn't much depth in the visuals either. The music is played very well, and I wish the visuals matched it. This film seems to have a similar length and overall idea as her 1984 Pictures at an Exhibition - take a famous composer, take a few of his most famous musical pieces, and show a simple, wordless story roughly based on the world he created. But I think the 1984 film did it better.

I do wonder if this served as inspiration for the 1998 Night on Bald Mountain by the same studio, which has some similarities?

There has been a bit of a trend in this past decade of Russian female animators making 18+ animated films about their love life for their student diploma works. I immediately thought of Out of the Ground, which also has a large woman and a small man and was even made in the same year (though at a different school). It seems like the theme might get a bit predictable, but I do find the art style and technique in this one to be interesting and stylish.

Just a fun and charming little fairy tale film, nothing deep about it. Neither of the directors ever directed another film. They both worked as animators before and they continued working as animators after. I don't really understand how or why this film got made at the Center of National Film, or what the funding pitch was (if any). Boykova previously worked for Master-Film and Pilot, while Fokin worked for a bunch of obscure studios I've never heard of and (once) for Pilot. There is some stylistic similarity to the previous film they both worked on, Ivan / Juan (2003) as well as the films of Aleksey Dyomin.

I've been busy with other things, so I looked for a wordless film to add today because it's quick to do. Not to say that this is a bad film, though - it's a nice story and funny. The only thing I don't really like is that the art style is simple to the point of primitivism - which has become more common in recent decades in Russian animation compared to the films made in the pre-digital era. Although you could say it's better for humour, it also makes it harder for me to connect with what is being shown because it feels more unreal.

A lovely art-house film that it seems to me is far less talked about than it should be, considering how influential it was, despite being little-seen by the wider public. The film in which Oscar-winner Aleksandr Petrov first found his artistic voice and used the technique that made him famous. The spark for Petrov's fascination with the writer Andrey Platonov, which led to his Oscar-nominated The Cow (1989). One of the first clear examples of Yuriy Norshteyn's growing influence as a pedagogue (there was also Prorokova's 1982 A Priest Had a Dog, but "Night" is far more Norshteyn-esque).

Tracking down the information for it took far longer than I thought it would. Petkevich himself seems to have never talked about it, nor the reasons for the two different release versions (the fact that there are two versions of the film doesn't even seem to have been noticed anywhere until now). Animator.ru has almost no data about the film, and lists the wrong studio. The information about the awards it won is almost certainly at least partly wrong.

I first read the two Platonov stories that it is based on just recently, and I would highly recommend them. They are very moving. I would even say that the film, good as it is, pales in comparison. I have not had time yet to see if there are any good English translations - if I find any, I'll add them to the description.

Petkevich himself (and his wife Yelena) would continue mining the images from "Night" for his subsequent films for more than a decade, until he abruptly became disillusioned with art-house filmmaking and denounced his previous films around the year 2000 or so. If I had the chance to ask him some questions, I would perhaps ask: "Do you still like the works of Platonov? Do you consider Platonov to be art-house? Or is that sort of thing okay in literature, but not in film? What would you do differently today?".

EDIT: To be honest, I'm not even quite sure that this IS paint-on-glass. Sometimes I think I see brush strokes, but I also see some graininess in some parts, so I wonder if it could be powder animation. In his later films, Petkevich seems to have used both of these techniques (or at least his wife Yelena used powder animation in Forest Tales... I'm no longer certain about The Tree of the Motherland).

Well, here's an actually good film for a change, after 2 days of less-than-stellar ones (that I uploaded mainly because they required little work to add)...
The draftsmanship of the artwork - really going for that early 20th century "Silver Age" upper class style - is wonderful. The style reminds me of the early animated films of Winsor McCay, although I doubt Amalrik had seen them. Generally speaking, less realistic styles were definitely more popular in Soviet animation in that year (although it was only two years later that prominent young director Anatoliy Petrov would switch mainly to a realistic style himself).

The danger with portraying a boring life is that it risks the film itself being boring, and it does move quite slowly by today's standards. I myself liked it, but those used to fast-paced thrills may not. Amalrik was past retirement age at 64 when he directed this, and it would be his second-last film after a brilliant career that had started in the early 1930s.

As for the subtitles, there was very little to translate. It is so close to being in the "wordless" category, but because of the girl's letter - no, not quite. The old 2016 subtitles were for an older video of the film that had 5 seconds missing in one place and 4 seconds in another, so the timings in the last half had to be corrected.

This is a weird one. It was made during a transitional period in more ways than one. Traditional analogue animation techniques were being replaced by digital ones, which were still very rough (as one can clearly see here). The studio Soyuzmultfilm had recently been liquidated and all its old personnel fired, only to be "recreated" as two different organizations both called "Soyuzmultfilm": one which had the rights to the old catalogue, and another that was supposed to continue making films (but with no source of income other than government grants). The country had recently had a currency crash and a financial crisis, as well as a new president.

I suppose the "new" studio had to prove that it was making films, and the three to-be graduates needed something on their CV, so Hitruk and Boyarskiy managed to arrange for their students to release something through the studio, creating a new series for short films similar to Merry-Go-Round (which I think was on a brief hiatus during this period). I don't think a "Goat #2" was ever made.

All in all, these three people graduated from the School of Advanced Studies at a very uncertain time, and subsequently kind of slipped between the cracks. None of them have any other work listed in animator.ru, although Yusupov (who had come from Tajikistan and had already received two film-related diplomas there) went on to make some commercials, music videos and short documentaries. As for the other two, I can't find a thing about them. Not even Polovnikova's first name.

The best animation in the film is honestly of the goat who appears in between the three shorts, who has a charm that reminds me of the studio's classic work of the 1960s and 1970s. I wonder who animated her? It doesn't really look like any of the other animation.