This film is part of the Merry-Go-Round series.

Description:

The first entry of an acclaimed long-running series of short, artistically daring children's cartoons by promising new directors. Includes: "Mosaic" (Nosyrev, with Barinova as art director), "Antoshka" (Nosyrev), "Absent-Minded Giovanni" (Anatoliy Petrov, based on a story by Italian writer Gianni Rodari), "Well, Just You Wait!" (Sokolskiy - the "pilot episode" of the most famous Soviet cartoon series).

Loosely inspired by an eponymous 1956 poetry collection by Ivan Nehoda (some images here), conceived by Galina Barinova, and pushed through by her husband Anatoliy Petrov, this almanac series was a great success and continued to be produced (at a rate of ~1 episode per year) until the year 2000, then was revived from 2012-2017. Until the end of the Soviet era, it continued to serve in its role of incubating young, promising talent, by giving them the opportunity to experiment with bold, original ideas for younger audiences.

Initially, all the stories in the almanac were worked on collectively. Each issue took nine months, and it had a clearly defined structure: a moral-instructive and cartoon part, a "comic" and an episode of "Well, Just You Wait!". Already after the first episode, the editors decided to spin out "Well, Just You Wait!" into a separate project, so the format changed. After the founders left in 1978, the almanac took the form of a more traditional collection of unrelated cartoons.

All of the directors (and Barinova) from this first episode went on to have distinguished careers and would make some fantastic, beloved works. The most influential mini-films were Nosyrev's "Antoshka", which became a famous children's song in its own right and spawned a whole series of films by him starring Antoshka and his friends, and "Well, Just You Wait" - it was handed off to a more experienced director for a single-reel-length treatment, Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin (the only one who was interested in it), in whose hands it became a surprise hit.

As for Petrov's "Absent-Minded Giovanni", it reportedly became rather influential among the new generation of directors at the studio. Petrov had always been interested in the nature of animation as an art of drawn movement. The bureaucrats from Goskino had some concerns about the cartoon and the almanac in general, with Minister Romanov reportedly saying that it was "an attempt to use the rostrum of children's animation to promote abstractionism", which Petrov considered high praise.

The original Giovanni story, along with the cartoon transcript, can be read in Russian and Italian here.