The original script for this film is not actually from folklore, but fairy tale The Tale of Brave Yatto and His Sister Teune (Сказка о храбром Ятто и его сестре Тэюнэ) by Zhanna Vitenzon. She rewrote a classical motif of the Neney people. Neney (ненэй) means "human", which is the same as Nanay (нанай). Therefore, perhaps the ancestors of the Neney people lived in Northeast China before migrating to the cold Arctic. There are two things to reinforce this point :

The names of all the peoples who settled around the Pacific Ocean actually refer only to element "human". Example : Han (Chinese), Hmoob (Hmong), Kadai (Thai)... Even the word "viet" in "Vietnam" is probably a variation of a word meaning "human".

The Deer with the Golden Antlers was the patron saint of all Tungusic peoples, including the ethnic group who gave birth to the Qing dynasty. He is probably a North Asian version of the sun god.

This story used to be very popular in Vietnam and it reminds me of an unforgettable memory. In a science show (KCT = khoa học-công nghệ-thông tin = science-technology-information) aired around 1994, a professor raised the following question : Two children set out to save their mother who was kidnapped by the Snow Queen, so she agreed to release the mother on one condition, that, the children had to make the needle float on the water. In the next week's program, the group of students answered that the kids just needed to attach the needle to the paper. The reason I remember it so well is because at the end of the show there was the witch's evil laugh, which was created by an actress. I really lost sleep for several nights because of fear.