Though the early Merry-Go-Rounds (from the 1960s) are more famous, I think they continued to be pretty good even as the studio began falling apart in the 1990s. This one is a good example - all of the entries are pretty strong. For the last, this isn't surprising and its director (Golovanova) was a veteran. But the first two are strong first works by new directors.

The style of the first should be immediately recognizable for fans of Vladimir Tarasov, as Koshkin was his art director, and a big part of what made those films so great. So it is here - the story could easily be boring, but the well-drawn art, characters, and inventive camera angles make it shine. Unfortunately, Koshkin never did get the chance to do any more directing.

The other new director, Guryev, was more lucky. His segment here adapts a literary original that is practically unadaptable (because it's like a miniature "Finnegans Wake", relying heavily on wordplay and things you can only do in writing), and he solved the problem by almost ignoring the text and doing a similar thing purely with visuals. How do you even animate things seen through warped glass? I can't imagine. The fat cat would reappear in Guryev's later work.

"Little Ram" is an English absurdity - actually, far more absurd in the adaptation here than the original folk song is. There seems to be a lot of love for English absurdity in Russia (I could name quite a few animated examples, starting with the 1970s works of Andrey Hrzhanovskiy), and in the early 1990s it seems to have been especially trendy.