Not really an amazing film, below average really. The wording of the script seems a bit unfocused and clumsy (at least in the Russian version), though the story itself is pretty simple. I find the Bombora puppet kind of decently-done and somewhat memorable. In the Russian version, the singer for the little girl has a lower voice than seems appropriate. This is the second film by Sulakauri on the site. I think the Georgian studio was just in the early stages of puppet animation, but it's quite hard to find information about it. There are some names I recognize later as directors who started working as animators here - e.g. Shosho Bodaishvili.

The earliest film from Moldova's animation studio yet on the site. Honestly, I don't know much about what went on over there - I haven't yet found any article or book about it. This film, at least, is not hard at all to understand, being a pretty simple story of a little braggart boy who at first gets rewards for it but later gets found out. It shows a typical Moldovan village environment. Detailed but not photorealistic artwork; kind of reminds me of "naive art". Reminds me a little of the same studio's 1986 film The Story of the Tenth Floor, though the technique and story are both different.

Another little-known early cartoon by Garri Bardin, translated for the first time. He was still making "safe" films, which a lot of directors did sometimes (but especially at the start of their careers, or after some particularly controversial episode) to build goodwill and trust with the higher-ups. This was commissioned by the Interior Ministry of the USSR to make their officers look good. Bardin and his team have fun with the idea by having the officer be heroic and dashing (and maternal - hence his name "Mamochkin", which comes from "mama") to a rather ludicrous extent, and adding some nice character animation and a catchy song into the mix.

It's still not a masterpiece, but you can see all the building blocks here for his films a few years later which would become a lot more well-known (before his move into stop motion animation and radical change of style).

Such a beautiful and delicate way of translating Shosty's music, I love it.

A lovely traditional Russian fairy tale film, and a very good entry in the Brumbergs' filmography. The late 1940s and early 1950s was the era of some very good adaptations of well-known fairy tales. In later decades, as directors ran out of classic stories to adapt and just because of stylistic preferences, they often tried to make their fairy tale films more "modern" and "interesting" (a good example is the 1975 adaption of The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats), but there's something to be said for just telling the stories in a straightforward and honest manner, without trying to subvert them or add "modern relevance" to them.

I like the script, the art direction, the animation and the voice acting a lot - nothing to complain about here.

There would be many later adaptations of this story, or a slightly different version of it in which the bear actually kidnaps Masha for a while. For example "Cheburashka" director Roman Kachanov made Little Masha and the Bear (1960), which uses puppets. Sergey Olifirenko directed Mashenka (1992), a bit of a satire in which the little girl's eagerness to help far outmatches her actual ability to do so. And of course, that idea then would lead directly into the popular modern computer animated TV series "Masha and the Bear". The little girl seems to get more and more destructive in each newer adaptation, which perhaps reflects the changing ways in which children are raised and how much they are expected to help around the house, to the point that the little girl's competence and personality in the original story begin to seem very unrealistic.

There's also a very similar fairy tale called "Morozko" in which Grandfather Frost (the Russian "Santa Claus") takes the place of the bear. This was adapted by director Vladimir Degtyaryov in The Wondrous Bell (1956, puppets) and by Ivan Aksenchuk in Frost Ivanovich (1981).

I think that this one is solid, but not brilliant. It's a kind of by-the-book adaptation. The story it's based on is quite well-written. The screenplay is good as well, following the original pretty closely. The art style is ok, but the late 1950s is probably my least favourite period of the Brumbergs' animation, as you still have the remains of realism (with rotoscoped characters) but the drawing style is much simplified and less interesting to look at compared to the late 1940s-early 1950s (to make each frame quicker to draw, I guess). Some other Soviet animation directors were doing the same thing as well in that period.

I think the king was a stronger character in the original story - it seemed like they weren't exactly sure what aspects focus on. He goes through the motions of the script, but doesn't really stand out as a character. Also, I think that in the original story it was bit of a running joke that "stoic down-to-earth salt-of-the-earth" Zerbino remains completely uncurious and unperturbed no matter what insane things happen around him, while that element is much less there in the cartoon.

As for the subtitles - like many of the other Brumberg films, I added this film to the site back before I decided on checking the quality of the English subtitles before adding any new film. So the subtitles that had been on the site for years were rated "unknown" (meaning, I had never checked them), but in fact were not very good; they were made in 2015 by Eus (a native Dutch-speaker with not-the-best command of Russian) on the basis of earlier subs by Zhurka75 (a native Russian-speaker with not-the-best command of English). I retranslated almost every line by consulting the Russian subtitles and the 19th-century English version of the story. I tried to stick to the 19th-century style of English for consistency, even when I changed the original lines to be closer to the actual Russian text.

Just about everyone is this film is cruel and cynical, doing anything possible to take advantage of other "suckers". There's no hint of the kindness that Soviet animation was traditionally known and praised for (at least by its fans). Even the supposed "good guy" commits murder. The stoic heroism of the traditional story is portrayed as something that maybe existed once, but is out of place in modern times. I think that in a Moscow-based studio, this sort of script would not have been allowed - the periphery apparently had more freedom in this regard, at least by 1985. Does it serve more as a warning, as a guide? Or as a preview of the dog-eat-dog times that were shortly to come?

I think I like this one less than Mailyan's previous film "Planet 888", although I can't say I dislike it. The direction is dynamic, but the poor video quality of the only copy I could find makes it a bit hard to watch. Though very different in technique, they are both about the evils of war (which, in each film, appears to be civilization-ending). In this film, though, the war itself takes up a much bigger amount of time.

A bit of a housekeeping note: I just noticed that Cynir had tried to add this film to the site in Jan 2024, but I didn't approve it back then because it still needed a translation.

Here are some translations of the film's title from Cynir's submission that could be added to the site if someone adds subtitles in those languages:

Па віне матацыкліста (be)
По вина на мотоциклетиста (bu)
З вини мотоцикліста (uk)
Chỉ tại kẻ đi xe gắn máy (vi)
由於摩托車手的失誤 (zh)

Found a comment about it that Eus sent me in Jan 2024: "Beautiful film, but the murder of the cow and the gruesomeness of the spider sisters caused it to not be broadcast much, if at all."