This was Akop Kirakosyan's final film. I'm not exactly clear on what happened after. The studio had, by this point, been taken over by organized crime and being sold off for parts. The number of directors who could keep working in those circumstances was fewer and fewer each year. According to animator.ru, he moved into the studio's management in 1997, and became the studio director from 2004-2009.

He only made three films, but had quite a distinctive style, dynamic and gritty - apparently influenced by the aesthetic of early Pilot Studio & Tatarskiy, or maybe Sergey Kushnerov in Ukraine.

All of Akop Kirakosyan's films seem to be about the injustice, stupidity, excess and self-destruction he was seeing around him as the USSR was collapsing and transitioning to gangster capitalism. But he cloaked them as plausible children's stories. His last two films (the ones made in newly-independent Russia - Fatum and this one) even have happy endings that arrive right as the situation appears most bleak. But they're such ridiculously implausible happy endings that the viewer has almost no choice but to notice that they could only happen in cartoons and fairy tales.

This film in particular is about those who do the hard, unglamorous work that keeps the rest of the society from disaster, yet get no thanks (or bread) for what they do. The love and care they show is unrequited. The unstated question is, how long can they keep doing it, and what will happen if they stop? There were many, many such people in newly-independent Russia. They were taken for granted and pushed down, while lavish riches were given to undeserving incompetents and crooks. What makes this particular story a fairy tale is that the little chick never does stop, and the ruthless fox who would tear everything apart turns out to be really nice, actually, and just as willing as the chick is to work for no pay.

One of the YouTube comments says that the moral is that "you can find friends in odd places", but I'm not so sure that that's what most kids watching this would take away from it. Rather, the most memorable thing is the central injustice of the story, which is never resolved... or maybe I'm completely wrong, and they'll focus on the slapstick and fun music and completely miss all of that.