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

Description:

Includes: "Two Hands" (by Koshkin, adapting Aleksey Shlygin's poem about a boy who wishes he had 10 hands), "The Glass" (by Guryev, adapting Oleg Grigoryev's nonsense story about some glaziers who install a warped glass window) and "Little Ram" (by Golovanova, adapting Samuil Marshak's translation of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", an English folk song about the shearing of a ram).

The original "Two Hands" poem can be read here or here (there seems to be more than one version of the poem, with the first one published in Murzilka #3, 1987, and the second closer to the one in the cartoon. For the exact text of the cartoon's version, click on the Russian subtitle description to the right). "Two Hands" is the only film ever directed by Nikolay Koshkin, who spent most of his career as art director for Vladimir Tarasov.

"The Glass" can be read here. It is very short. The first bit of dialogue in the cartoon is a strangely abbreviated version of the final sentence of the story. This was Guryev's first film, the start of his successful career as director (though unfortunately interrupted by the economic crisis from the mid 1990s to the 2000s).

Samuil Marshak's "Little Ram" can be read here, while the English original can be read on Wikipedia. Marshak's translation has some notable differences from the English (for example: the ram is not black, and there is no little boy who lives down the lane), so it had to be retranslated, or the cartoon wouldn't have made any sense. Its director, Nataliya Golovanova, had already made 14 films, but this was the first time she made a short for "Merry-Go-Round" (usually, it was the other way around; new directors would get their start in "Merry-Go-Round" before being allowed to work on longer films).