Another one of those films that we are only able to see because of the volunteers of the RuTracker animation scanning project who've been buying up and scanning many old Soviet 35mm reels and Betacam cassettes, searching for rare animation. This one is a well (if a bit drily) told romantic fairy tale about the virtues of patience, kindness and purpose (on the male side), and faithfulness, devotion and competence (on the female side). I guess this might be based on certain Tajik or Persian folklore, but I haven't found what specifically, and the title card makes no mention of that, so who knows...

It's the fourth film by Masurhojaev on the site, and probably the one with the most "realistic" (dare I say, "socialist realistic"?) art style. It wouldn't be out of place in the early 1950s, except that of course the Soviet Union didn't use cutout animation in the 1950s, nor was there any animation being produced in Tajikistan then. The art is well-done, but I do think that it shows that cutout animation isn't ideal for certain scenes, as the film often resorts to fading in and out between successive frames to "hide" just how few frames per second there really are.

For the translation, the Russian word "shchastye" has been alternately translated as "happiness", or "(good) fortune". A few Tajik-language words have been translated into their closest English equivalents: "Kishlak" (a highland village used as a summer mountain pasture) has been translated as simply "village". "Tubeteika" (a Tajik skullcap) has been translated as "cap".

The date on animator.ru is 1985, but the film itself says 1984.