Soyuzmultfilm
(writers: A. Ankor, Vasiliy Livanov)
In the sky, (director: Vladimir Tarasov)
Like an intimate call... (art-director: N. Koshkin)
Twinkle the stars' golden eyelashes... (composer: Boris Shnaper) (cosmonaut-consultant: A. Leonov)
Mirror
Mirror to
Mirror to the
Mirror to the Past
Oh, look what a bright star!
Hm, it's very close...
Do not be afraid. That bright star only seems to be near,
but in fact its light took thousands of years to reach us,
so you and I see only the past image of this star.
The light of all the stars that you see are just images of the distant past.
Is it really possible to see the past?
People have always dreamed of it.
For example, through the imagination of writer Mark Twain,
the 19th century met up with the 10th....
I recognize that! It's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"!
Right!
Yet, Mark Twain was not interested in how the Yankee got to the past.
But the hero of the writer H.G. Wells...
was already constructing a time machine. Remember?
Hmm, pretty cool! But it's all just fiction.
Of course it's fiction.
Science-fiction writers of all eras have sent people to the past or the future.
But once, the residents of a small town in Central Europe
witnessed a fantastic event.
High in the sky, among swirling clouds
there appeared an amazing image of some sort of big battle.
For a long time, the church treated the whole affair as a divine sign -
a miracle.
But it wasn't a miracle. It was a rare atmospheric phenomenon, a kind of mirage.
Much later, researchers who studied the surviving historical documents
came to the conclusion that it had been the famous Battle of Waterloo.
It happened like this:
The currents of cold and warm air had stratified
and formed in the atmosphere a giant tunnel of light
with a huge air-mirror
through which the battle was seen by the residents of a town far away from it.
Yet light waves carried the image of the battle even further - into space.
So everything gets carried into space with light? Everything in the world?
That's right.
- You and I, too? - You and I, too!
Our images are always flying through the universe.
But if an image has flown off into space, then I guess it can't be seen again?
Why not?
To do this, one would have to put in the light's path...
Ah! A mirror!
Right!
At the point being approached by the image, we'd have to place a mirror
and it will reflect the image back to us.
The universe itself will not make us such a mirror.
But people have managed to build a space telescope
with which one can, even down to the small details,
see the events taking place on planets around distant stars.
Right now our ship is approaching to dock onto this giant telescope,
and you and I will see these distant worlds.
I'll show you a planet very similar to our ancient Earth.
Why does it have these colors?
The composition of its atmosphere is completely different,
resulting in a different light spectrum.
That which we have just seen
happened on this planet hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Today it may have the same advanced civilization as we have on Earth.
How I would like to see the distant past of our beautiful Earth...
For that, you'd need to go far, far away in the universe,
and build a mirror that could reflect back to us the images of distant times
that fly through interstellar space at the speed of light.
I'll grow up and build that mirror!
Then we will see our past, right? - Right!
animators: Vladimir Zarubin, Yuriy Kuzyurin, Aleksandr Mazayev, Tatyana Fadeyeva, Aleksandr Bukin, Valeriy Ugarov, A. Davydov, Nikolay Kukolev
In the sky,
Like an intimate call...
Twinkle the stars' golden eyelashes...
camera: Kabul Rasulov sound engineer: Vladimir Kutuzov assistant director: T. Mititello
art assist.: Yelena Bogolyubova, Olga Bogolyubova montage: M. Miheyeva, script editor A. Snesarev voices: M. Vinogradova, L. Lyubetskiy, prod. F. Ivanov
The End Subs by Chapaev & Eus, ed. Niffiwan (2022)