Though I quite like the mother goat's song at the start and end (with its rhythm almost certainly inspired by Brubeck's "Take Five"), I much prefer the excellent 1957 adaptation of the same story that tells it in the traditional way. I also prefer Aristov's films that he made both before this (his collaborations with Hodatayeva such as "The Brave Fawn") and after this (e.g. "The Tree Frog"). I'm not really sure that this one is his "most appreciated"; it's definitely not the one that won the most awards.

Compared to 1957, all of the characters are less appealing except possibly the wolf. The goat-mother here is portrayed as a hapless worry-wart who tries to prevent her kids from having fun but is powerless to do so (she even tells them to not play inside the house while she's gone, the opposite of the goat-mother from 1957, and they wink to themselves as she says this). Her melody, I think, is meant to be "needlessly complicated".

While the goat kids in 1957 have many positive qualities, the ones here have kind of an ugly design to them, act kind of bratty, and the melody of their signature song is not very appealing but rather simple (I think). This also makes the wolf's decision to join their song not that believable to me, because their song is just not that good. And also, as far as I can tell, the wolf is still ravenously hungry at the end of the film. He's still gotta eat at some point, and nobody's given him anything except a flower for that concert. And yet the film acts like everything is resolved. So the "moral", such as it is, is actually a dangerous one.

So, overall, it's not a favourite of mine, though I do like some things about it.

I love this one, and I think it would've been a favourite if I'd seen it in childhood. If anyone's searching for something that feels similar, I'd recommend Silver Hoof by the same director, and especially Leonid Nosyrev's The Little Tiger On the Sunflower, in which the animals also only make animal sounds, just like here (although the story in that one is more fantastical).

When compared to Zyablikova's earlier Soviet-era cartoons, I think the big difference here is that despite an outward look that suggests that it is, this is not actually aimed at an audience of children. Which makes sense, as the once-admirable distribution network for Russian animation had by this point been broken down for many years, so the film was probably made for Zyablikova herself, her studio colleagues and other professionals at a few domestic film festivals.

The lonely woman is actually the main character, and no special effort is made to present her perspectives or worries in a way that younger viewers could easily relate to. The titular rabbit, whom a young viewer will naturally try to identify with, does nothing noteworthy or praiseworthy in the entire film other than simply exist, first as a good mama's boy and then as an insufferable teenager. We're a world away here from the cartoons of someone like Snezhko-Blotskaya in which the young, male, idealistic main character would take risks and be the main force for positive change in the world (or, more recently in 2015, Dmitriy Palagin tread similar ground).

>>3
>since Soyuzmultfilm had been plundering or pillaging youtube channels other than their own, it had disappeared

Sounds about right. It's why I often try to save any unique videos that I find, these days.

A number of the subtitles on this site are only here because I happened to save the hardsubbed Youtube videos before they were deleted (for example, many of the ones by houzdog03). (the full process is then: VirtualDub to convert to Xvid Avi, AviSubDetector to create srt file with empty lines, Subtitle Workshop to enter in the text).

>>2
It was on YouTube but since Soyuzmultfilm had been plundering or pillaging youtube channels other than their own, it had disappeared. I tried looking elsewhere, but I don't know where I can find it so I can watch it again.

>>1
Neat, thanks for sharing.

You don't remember where you found the English voice-over, do you?

I first saw this cartoon on an episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, (one of my many favorite PBS shows,), which was about differences (the scene was that Mr Rogers and the mailman Mister McFeely watched different kids shows from other countries, and they showed an episode of Good night Little ones with this cartoon as the cartoon for the episode (later that year Mr Rogers went to the USSR, to guest star on the show and Tatyana Vedneeva, the host of Good night Little ones, went to visit on Mr Rogers show)



After seeing that episode, I tracked this film down and I found an English voiceover of the cartoon, which I wrote down the dialog, I sent it to Eus, which he uploaded.


I hope those of you who see this film enjoy it.

This one really surprised me.

About the only thing I wish had been done differently is the music in the introductory scene with the spirits tormenting the boy - that really should have been traditional percussive Japanese music.

Other than that, I think it's a little masterpiece.

I think I'm not really convinced by this film as a concept. Some interesting ideas in there, but... well, it's a pretty polemical poem and is about a pretty brutal, unforgiving time period. And those nuances are just kind of glossed over - but in the process, the victory of the pro-revolution "good guys" who are portrayed as gentle artists becomes unbelievable. Maybe it's just me.

Thanks for the thanks. :) I like those films as well. Although my favourite film by Karayev is probably The Lodgers of an Old House (though it's very close).

Yes, I had hoped that the site would also be useful for people studying the language. If you go to Browse>Films, you can filter the list of films to include only those that have Russian subtitles, and then switch back and forth between Russian and English as you watch.

And you can also sort the list of films by "Wordiness" depending on how dense you want the dialogue to be (I'm not entirely sure how useful that is, but it was possible to do and kind of neat, so I figured, why not?)