Nice book! Thanks for that link.

Yes, I found it hard to translate as well. But if you're trying to do it, I think you should use the latest English subtitles that are here, rather than the older ones elsewhere online (a lot of which have mistakes).

By the way, regarding the names of the characters:
(Professor) Selezniov = slug
(Captain) Zelyony = green
Gromozeka = the root is "grom" (thunder), probably because of how boisterous he is
Veselchak = happy person (he's often smiling and eager to please in the film)
(Professor) Verhovtsev = higher
Ptitsa Govorun = talkative bird (I was fortunate that English already has the word "chatterbox", which I could easily modify into "chatterbird")
Glot = possibly from "glotka" (throat)

Most of these I kept as is, but I did translate "Green" because that's a common English surname too.

I have watched this movie on Vietnam Central Television (VTV1, "The Little Flowers" program) since I was very young, of course only on black-white TV. This is a very challenging movie about translation. Here is the film story (фильм-сказка) : http://www.barius.ru/biblioteka/book/852

I have watched this movie on Vietnam Central Television since I was very young, although I did not know the name of the movie at that time and only watched it on black-white TV. However, the child's brain remembers the fanciful scene in the circus for a long time, so it will surprise you when you watch it again later. That, I think, is the psychological success of the filmmakers.

I feel like the tricksters in this film (or someone much like them) appeared again a year later in Nataliya Golovanova's excellent "Sweet Porridge". Which is odd, as the two films share no crew except for two animators (Aleksandr Dorogov & Violetta Kolesnikova) and the script editor Tatyana Paporova.

Sometimes there were "borrowings" like that in Soyuzmultfilm at the time.

The fact that they leave the planet so readily at the end suggests to me that the cutthroat capitalist mindset had not yet penetrated very deeply into Russia. Which makes a lot of sense, as the story was written in 1977. The faces are American, but they sure don't act very American!

Before the 2000s, most Vietnamese animators had to study in the Soviet Union and Russia in the form of aid. I heard that, when Vietnam had a civil war (as you know, in the 1960s-70s Canada sent military medical experts to South Vietnam), some East German and Soviet film experts also followed the secret route to Tây-Ninh war zone (Vietnam - Cambodge border) to help Vietcong learn filmmaking techniques, because these people are all very young and have low education. After reunification, these people combined with Southern film experts (most of whom were influenced by French animation, some even went to Hollywood to study professionally), so it's strange, in the 1980s our animation flourished. However, in the 1990s, there was a serious recession because of the "invasion" of Japanese animation. To be honest, young Vietnamese people don't know much about French, American, Russian and European-American animation in general.

So Đặng-Nhân-Lập is not a famous filmmaker ; here, I tried translating the film into English subs. So far it is still a classic one in Vietnam : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTpFz8DxL30

>>3
Thanks for those videos! How odd to see Vietnamese "Nu, pogodi" sequels! I assumed those 4 videos weren't originally widescreen (they were for TV, weren't they?), so I viewed them through the DIY page here and set the "Adjust aspect ratio" to "0.75" to get the correct width.

Yes, I can see the resemblance. Though I don't think the animation style itself was influenced by the Soviet Union, just the characters! The weightlessness and really loose drawing style also reminds me of the early Georgia Film animated films from the 1930s and 1940s (although those had a higher budget). Like these ones up on culture.ru:
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19066/argonavty-kolkhida
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19058/proidokha-khitraya-lisica
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19065/yunyi-strelok-voroshilovskii-strelok
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19064/chiora-dostoinyi-otvet

And this one on Animatsiya (the earliest one on this site currently)
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=878

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-_MylNvXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0guWnH4tQNU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvKTsuJkxvA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8bRkE76wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPxevUeeU-Q

I found this film to be very unique to all of the Middle Eastern cinema. This was also the style of Vietnamese animation in the 1980s and 1990s which was influenced by the Soviet Union, of course.

Sheesh, some of these late Soviet Georgia-Film cartoons are really hard to look at...
It kind of seems like in the 1980s, they often stopped caring about drawing well and the quality of the animation degraded down to the studio's beginnings in the 1930s/1940s (or worse). It seems like they took longer to get the animation looking nice than most of the other studios, and then they backslid faster once country-wide standards began to slip (despite some great output in the mid 1950s and even some into the early 1980s).

Maybe the much simplified style used by directors such as Bondo Shoshitaishvili and Konstantin Matsaberidze in the 1970s is to blame.