Description:

A groundskeeper tries to get rid of two stray dogs. Not for children.

The film makes reference to a well-known story by Ivan Turgenev that was part of the Soviet school curriculum, "Mu-Mu" (see an animated adaptation here) - a tragedy about a deaf-mute peasant named Gerasim, who loses the love of his life and gets a second chance when he rescues a drowning puppy named "Mu-mu". In the end of that story, Gerasim is driven to drown the puppy he loves.

Some quotes from an interview with the director:

"Belka and Strelka" was released at the moment when the [funds for my trilogy "Optical Illusion"] ceased. It was filmed with money from a private company. The beginning of the 1990s was an interesting period because there were practically no honest ways to earn money; businessmen "laundered" money in various ways. Some invested in cinema. "Belka and Strelka" is precisely the brainchild of those processes.

That "brainchild" ended up being quite cruel. Two dogs are frolicking, making fun of a mean groundkeeper. Everything is cute and funny. And suddenly he drowns them, and what's more, it turns out that the fountain where he throws them is already overflowing with dog corpses. Weren't you afraid that children would be shocked by the ending?

This is not a film for children, which I warn people about every time. I first realized the fact that "Belka and Strelka" is not understandable for all ages in Germany, where I went to do an exhibition. I was taken to visit a family of artists. They had three children - the boys were 15 and 10 years old, and the girl was about four. She received me warmly, led me by the hand through the rooms, told me things. The owners persuaded me to put on "Belka and Strelka" for the kids - I had a videocassette with me. I warned them again: the film is not for children. But their attitude to animation is the same as ours: oh, "toons"! The adults went into another room, and the children stayed to watch. I heard laughter, the children reacted well to the film. But when I returned, the girl sat to one side and looked at me with completely different eyes. The boys had a normal reaction, they understood the meaning of the film and begged me for a copy. That's when I finally became convinced that it is important to clearly understand for what audience you are making a film. This directly applies to our television. They say that it does not affect the child's consciousness. It does! The child watches these commercials, these dark films with murders and shootings, and something is deposited in their head. What the consequences will be is unknown. It is necessary to make a special children's channel, or to delimit the airtime so that on-screen violence is inaccessible to children.

In "Belka and Strelka" a monument to Mumu flashes. Yuri Grymov fussed over the idea of ​​such a monument for a long time and finally made it happen. Who influenced whom?

I don't know if Grymov saw my cartoon, but it was filmed much earlier than the real monument appeared. And the drawing with the fountain-monument to Mumu, in which dogs are drowned, appeared even earlier, in the mid-70s. Much later it was published in "Uralsky Rabochy" and the newspaper was immediately flooded with letters from grandparents: "What a bad artist! How dare he mock animals like that!?" I had to prove to the editor with a pile of satirical magazines that there is such a genre as black humor. And you say children are shocked! Not all adults can understand this humor. But in that drawing, in the comic book that I made based on it, and in the cartoon I simply asked myself the questions: "What is true concern for animals?", "What is compassion?" Why do they present Gerasim as a positive hero in our schools? It seems different to me, Turgenev wrote about something else, but in Soviet schools the meaning of the story was twisted to suit the ideology.

You mentioned a comic...

That was also a course assignment [at VGIK] - to take a classic work and make a genre storyboard based on it: comedy, tragedy and melodrama. I chose "Mumu" and my story was even published in the youth magazine APN. But, judging by the reaction of that German girl, what I created was not a tragedy or even a thriller, but a real children's horror film.

Reviewer Aleksey Surtayev considers this to be Aynutdinov's best film.