I find just about all of Smirnova's films so interesting, surprising and enjoyable. It's a shame that she had to have her career exactly in the era when the money for this sort of thing was barely available, and was not nearly as artistically productive as she could have been only a decade earlier.

There's still one film of hers I'd like to translate, but I can't find it - «Когда я был лягушкой» (1992, Приз МКФ «КРОК – 93», Киев).

I wish a nice HD scan of this existed rather than this faded print. Degtyaryov's Firefly 4 has much nicer colours and detail...

Quite a charming, optimistic film that shows a slice of typical daily life at the time through a child's perspective, but should be interesting for adults too (it's not aimed at them, but it doesn't insult its viewers' intelligence like some children's films). It feels kind of like Roman Kachanov's later films to me.

It seems that by this point, not too much was left of the original "Firefly" concept, other than "collection of shorter stories aimed at children taking place in a contemporary location". Unlike the previous ones, there's no central narrator (firefly or otherwise), and the stories are NOT adapted from previously-released children's books or comics.

It's kind of neat that despite there being two directors (each one responsible for one story, I assume), the film is stylistically unified and the first story flows fairly smoothly into the second.

The directors are also the art directors, but actually, the art style seems heavily inspired by the 1961 "Big Troubles" from the Brumberg sisters.

I think this one's quite charming. I wasn't sure about the "religion" genre as there's nothing explicit, but it probably fits however you choose to interpret it. Also it's refreshing to see a modern animated film whose characters actually seem to live and breathe when they move.

>>2
Azerbaijan's animated films seem to have been a lot lesser-known than Armenia's in the USSR, as a whole, and there are only a few of them on this site. I'll have to see if I can find anything else that's interesting from there.

As for my own thoughts, I too thought this had a rather characteristic and interesting art style. But as animation, things don't MOVE that well (though not terribly, either), and I found it was sometimes so distracting that it was hard to tell what was going on.

Though I never got entirely lost - the story's pretty straightforward, after all. And things become clearer on a second viewing.

Very nice music (usually a strong point of films from the southern USSR regions).

Sound effects/voices were distractingly "wacky". I'm not sure it was really necessary to go THAT far. It made it harder for me to relate to the characters.

Overall, a bit mixed. Although, very good and daring for a first attempt.

It seems, unless I'm mistaken, that the director of this never returned to animation afterwards...

Things that stood out to me about this one:
- The way Garsevan spends his time at the nature reserve is kind of unconvincing and it seems like he could've done most/all of that at a city park. I think the people who made this movie were not actually very outdoorsy people.
- Fun character designs for the three villains (although the trigger-happy yet miniscule caricature of an American cowboy is a bit... suspect)
- Robert Saakyants was one of the 3 animators (not mentioned on animator.ru), though this was three years AFTER he started directing his own films
- the film is fundamentally pessimistic. The hapless main character ultimately can't do a thing to solve the problem of the poachers, other than escape to the moon with a few refugees (!). A decade or two earlier, at least in Soyuzmultfilm, no script editor would have allowed such a script to go to production - they would have likely insisted on adding some positive qualities to Garsevan that would have allowed him to solve the problem, or show a path for those watching the film to solve it. A decade later, in the Perestroika period, such hopeless plots became commonplace in the Moscow animation studios, too.

Loved the art and technique on this one! Might bookmark for future reference

>>1
>shouldn't the chart be called a map instead?
Hm... although "sea-chart" is pretty commonly used, I suppose that "chart" by itself to mean "map" is not.
On the other hand, maybe it IS among sailors? A quick Google search suggests that maybe that's the case.
I suppose I was loathe to change Mr. Icon's translation as he seemed to know what he was doing.
It would probably be the safest thing to do, but I'm still a bit unsure.

>>1
Indeed. Although I find what happens more disturbing than the way it is visually portrayed, which is why I guess I didn't mark this (I normally really dislike "gore").

By the way, at some point, this site will have a better way of displaying what age category a film is aimed at than a simple "NSFW" genre. So for a film like this, I guess it should clearly be marked as aimed at adults and contraindicated for children (with a "neutral" for teens). There will inevitably be some debatable value judgements involved in that, but on the whole, probably preferable to having no info about that at all.

This film seems like "Dam Jong the Braveman" from Vietnam.