This reminds me of certain old Newgrounds Flash cartoons or music videos; there is not much of a story and it sustains itself almost entirely on mood and vibes.

An absolutely bleak film, and one that almost certainly would not have been made by those who lived through it as they would have found focusing on the worst aspects of humanity by those trapped inside the city to be of bad taste, when it is the actions of those who did the RIGHT thing that would be seen as more worth memorializing in art. But once almost 8 decades have passed, people start to be drawn to the more shocking and macabre stories.

The NKVD records on the subject were not released until 2004. What they say is that in the worst period of winter 1941-1942, 100,000 people were dying of starvation per month, with 1.6-2 million people being the final death toll. The first arrests for cannibalism were in Dec 1941, with 9 arrests, and the total was 2105 a year later, with about 5/6 of those being for eating corpses rather than live people. So, ~350 arrests out of a ~3.2 million people city. Most were women, often unsupported women with dependent children, and 90% had minimal education.

The takeaway from the Siege of Leningrad is that in the most unimaginable circumstances, most residents did NOT resort to becoming the lowest savages and preferred to fight or (often) die rather than betray their dignity and values. But of course, there were those of whom that was not true, and that is also a part of history that cannot be erased.

A film from the perspective of a young woman (Ruditskaya was 28 years old when she directed this) about a typical day and a missed connection, but she finds beauty in her life despite that. "I didn't really need it all that much, it's his loss more than mine", she seems to be saying. The city happens to be Seoul simply because it was commissioned by a Seoul animation festival.

Visually, a good example of the kind of thing that I've noticed from many students of the HSE Art and Design School - bold design choices that require original approaches to animation and movement, quite far from realism. Also, since these are young students, many of them bring their own lives into the plots of their films. I personally couldn't relate to this one and even found it vaguely distasteful, despite appreciating the art style.

The YouTube description says that it wasn't accepted to any film festivals, with the implication that it was because of political reasons. I think that could well be part of the reason, since the Israeli cause is currently rather controversial, to put it mildly. But part of it could be that it's a very simple film that simplifies a rather complex issue. Of course, you could say that the whole job description of art (or at least, a certain kind of art) is to simplify complex issues, but perhaps this particular simplification simply didn't resonate with any of the film festival curators, and even Bardin's name was not enough to overcome that.

It also requires some familiarity with history and cultural traditions that not everybody has.

Maybe you'd want to add the subs.

Very, very sweet and child-friendly, this one. Although I find the randomness doesn't hold my interest after a while. I think it helps if you know the original fairy tales.

I find Pavlenko's films (what I’ve seen of them so far) to be very hit-or-miss. Some are quite interesting, others I would rather not have seen.

This film of Bardin's has only just been made available online (published on Soyuzmultfilm's YouTube and VK channels, of all places - this marks his first time working together with Soyuzmultfilm since 1990, I believe), although he's made two more since then - "Ave Maria" (funded 2021, finished 2023) and "Everlasting Lament" (funded and finished 2024) - and is in middle of crowdfunding another one (Russian Waltz). I think all of Bardin's films since his 2010 feature "The Ugly Duckling" seem to have roughly the same scaffolding: take one or several pieces of famous classical music, take some sort of didactic message formed from Bardin's impressions of the society around him, and play it out wordlessly using puppet animation closely synchronized to the music. Actually, I would even say that he's been doing that since the 1990s, but there used to be more other elements involved, more attention to character and story, to the joy of movement and art, and I think it led to some of his best work (1990s-2000s). Whereas his more recent productions have become more spartan, more focused... but also more artificial-feeling as a result, almost more akin to student films. I watched this and thought near the beginning "kids don't play like that - sitting symmetrically on either side and robotically putting sand into their buckets". But being in time to the music seemed to be more important than having characters act realistically. To compare, his earlier film Chucha 3 (2004) also had a little boy whose movements were closely timed to the music, sometimes a bit artificially, yet the final effect was more natural and heartfelt.

The final didactic message is that "normal", "rich" and "poor/criminal" elements of society should cooperate in order to all be collectively better off.

A sweet cartoon for really little kids. I must say, the new restoration makes it look really stunning - the beauty of this more "modernist" 1960s art style really shines. This was made in the fifth year of the "rebirth" of Ukrainian animation, after being suspended in the late 1930s. Effectively, this means that unlike Russian and Georgian and even Armenian animation (which had animation studios through this period, though barely so in Armenia's case), Ukrainian animation never went through any sort of "socialist realist" phase.

I find Golovanova's cartoons of the 1980s to have a really beautiful, fluid animation style, with pretty interesting screenplays as well. My favourite is still "Sweet Porridge", but I really liked this one as well. There hasn't been much commentary about it, but I liked the review by Alessandro Criscitiello that I found on LetterboxD:
"Facing loneliness together through a surreal, melancholic and virtually endless circus act. Beautiful. I'd never stop watching it."