A pretty nice early, little-known film by the most internationally famous Uzbek animation director, Tulyahodzhayev. Serious and philosophical, with very nice drawings. The animation seems like it uses only key frames and no in-betweens, unfortunately -- the team was tiny, with only one animator, and I suppose it was decided to focus on detailed drawings over smooth motion.

The only dialogue are some important lines of poetry at the beginning and end. I could not make the translation rhyme, but I did try to keep it close in meaning and have the same number of syllables.

My interpretation of the three challenges is that the first is "romantic pursuit", the second is "career" (or something like it), and the third is a "midlife crisis", e.g. buying a sports car to try and bring back your youth.

A fairly early cartoon from Uzbekistan's national studio. The screenplay is ok, though nothing special. The colours are nice and bright, but the art design and animation are primitive. Thankfully, those things did get better soon.

This one does have some signs that were translated in the subtitles, but nothing really essential to the story.

I love the animated shapes in this one, though the actual love story isn't all that happy. A lady is changed by a man's interest, but he wants her to stay the same as when he met her, or (even better) to be a "sounding board" for him (so he tries to mould her into an "ear"). In the end, he "succeeds" in a way (killing off her love for him in the process), but nobody ends up happy with the result...

I could find almost no information about it - it's not on animator.ru or most other film databases, it just popped up suddenly on Uzbekfilm's YouTube channel.

This is the first of Tulyahodzhayev's films I've seen aside from his famous There Will Come Soft Rains (1984). Obviously, he was not a one-hit wonder, even though that film is far more famous than anything he has done since. Since the USSR broke up not long after, most of his works have not been distributed outside of Uzbekistan. I'll have to see if I can find some of his other films (well, I already found Alpomish, but it's quite dialogue-heavy and I don't know Uzbek).

I think that this film is masterfully made. Some may say that the meaning is a bit cryptic, I wouldn't. I think it only seems that way because the traditional Central Asian town setting is very alien to most of us, but the actual story seems to be pretty straightforward once it gets going. Its themes of staying true to one's artistic inspiration in the face of your "superiors" trying to drag you down reminds me of "Hoffmaniada" in a way (which started production not too long before this film did, but was finished only in 2018).

Overly optimistic? Maybe. Or maybe it's saying that you can't keep people's inspirations bottled up forever, that eventually matters will erupt, one way or another.

I think that as a commercial, it is saved by the live-action footage. It takes a while to get going. The voice actor sounds very official and stilted (though he does have correct pronunciation), while the animation (especially at the beginning) seems too stylized, and isn't especially attractive.

The film is the earliest one directed by Nina Shorina that I've found yet. Thankfully, she would improve a lot in later years.

Vladimir Petkevich's later films, like this one, seem to not get nearly the attention of his early ones (from the 1980s and 1990s), so I thought I'd partly correct this by subtitling one of them, as his filmography shows an interesting artistic progression. A rare example of an artist going the other way from arty to conventional. Petkevich repudiated his earlier sophisticated, dreamy, avant garde style and decided to make films that are more mainstream:

"I long ago forever gave up on arthouse films. Sorry, but arthouse is made for fools and critics. I have no desire to do it. When I make films for children, these family films, it is a chance to help someone."

Despite this, it's his earlier films that always get written about, when they are noticed at all. And for myself, too, it's the earlier films that I remember and love. His later films, like this one, tend to be well-made... but they feel like most of the sharp edges are smoothed over. For example, there's a part in this film where the old couple have gotten rich, and the old lady puts the hen that gave them their wealth in a gilded cage. It seems that this thoughtless act of cruelty (which was foreshadowed earlier when the old woman gave the hen only a small treat) should be a turning point in the story. Instead, it really doesn't change much. The hen seems a bit disappointed, but is made happy again when the cat brings the gramophone closer to her.

The end result is a film that is well-made and full of rich, little details, but inoffensive and not very memorable.

In his book "The Masters of Short-form Animation", Aleksey Surtayev has a chapter about Petkevich in which he makes the same point:

A sad paradoxical situation has arisen: having reoriented himself toward the mass audience, Vladimir Petkevich has failed to attract that very audience. The works of the Belarusian animator can be viewed at festivals and on the internet. Here is what the director says in an interview: "It is not commercially viable for cinemas to show our cartoons, and television is not interested in them either. We show them at festivals, win awards, but what's the point? The cartoons gather dust on the shelves and, in essence, become useless to anyone. At the same time, attempts to post the works on the internet are categorically suppressed. But I'm not against it at all, let the kids watch them somewhere... But in the end, it turns out that we are doing all this huge work just for the sake of ticking boxes."

>>4
>I was looking for more info of the director but couldn't find more stuff more than his profile on animator.rus
If you can read Russian or Azeri, there's some info to be found in the 2018 book Azerbaijani Animation. After reading that, I added Aganagi Axundov as co-director and updated the description, although he was left out of the film's credits.

>>2
>There was one Azeri animated film made in 1965, available on YouTube.
Do you have a name or a link?

According to this article there was one made at Azerbaijantelefilm in that year called "Talking Lights" (Говорящие огоньки), which is confirmed on p.20-21 of the book Azerbaijani Animation (2018) (unfortunately, only 200 copies of it seem to have been printed and I can't find it anywhere, although some scanned pages can be read on Google Books).

I can't find that film on YouTube, though.

Sometimes this series would feature new directors who then didn't go on to direct anything else of note. This is the case for Orlova and Bogomolova, directors of the first one - they were animators before and they went back to being animators after (although Orlova briefly returned to directing in 1994). I can't say that their film stands out all that much.

The next one, by Galina Barinova, is a short and low-effort entry, as are most of hers at this time (her best period began about a decade later).

Finally, the one by Garri Bardin - his second film. He came to the studio as a voice actor in 1973, and directed his first film in 1975, which caused (in Bardin's words) a lot of resentment from others at the studio as he was perceived as being an outsider who had "jumped the line". This has an early example something that would become common in Bardin's later films - noticing and capturing some ugly aspect of human nature, and encouraging (directly or not) the viewers to do better. This sometimes led to beautiful and sublime films such as Adagio, but not always! Sometimes, I think it's the director's distaste and bitterness for people around him that come through stronger.

I have mixed feelings about this one. The only time I've ever seen someone tying a tin can to an animal's leg is in this cartoon - I don't think it was especially common, at least not in my neighborhood. By showing this ugly behaviour in detail in the first place, the cartoon also teaches kids that this is something that you can do, even though the boy is sorry at the end. I suppose I also didn't find that ending too believable - it's too saccharine. On the other hand, I like the art style and the "play" aspect of a battle in which the two sides transform into various creatures. This sort of "duel" has also appeared in a few other films in this series: "Mosaic" from #1, "The Game" from #16 and "Who Was First?" in #27 (not on the site yet).

>>4
>But this dub, which was made by DEFA, is currently lost
Interesting. It wasn't even that long ago. I bet it'll be found one day when there is the will to find it. Just like those early Ukrainian animations from the 1930s (1, 2) that had long been thought lost in WW2 were suddenly discovered by DEFA in their archives in the last few years...