Description:

Polar bears, walruses and penguins (sic) see off the Soviet members of the North Pole-1, the world's first crewed drifting ice station led by Ivan Papanin, as they board the icebreakers Taimyr and Murman to return to Moscow. Includes German hardsubs.

The film's music was to be composed by renowned Ukrainian composer Aleksandr Znosko-Borovskiy, but it seems that neither the planned sound nor the music were finished, and the film was never released at the time. The music in the first video above was added to the film in Oct 30, 2025 by German Kryzhin, and is made up of various contemporary songs about the arctic expedition. However, the lyrics are not currently translated in the existing subtitles.

The film was long thought lost, but was discovered in the German Bundesarchiv by Russian film archivist Pyotr Bagrov. It had been taken to Germany along with other Ukrainian films as war trophies by Nazi soldiers of the Wehrmacht during WW2. Access to them was strictly prohibited, and viewing required special permission from the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, as evidenced by the old German subtitles preserved on one of the films.

This "animated joke" was meant to be a special gift to the participants of the scientific research expedition after they had been awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union a year earlier. Visible in the film are station chief Papanin, hydrologist Shirshov, astronomer Fyodorov, and radio operator Krenkel. The have a sumptuous farewell feast of fish, assorted fruits, cake, and a bottle of sparkling wine. Stalin's portrait hangs on their wall. Later in the cartoon, geographer Schmidt parachutes down and joins the team. His colleagues greet him with a friendly kiss, of the kind that much later became a famous "trademark" of Leonid Brezhnev. Copies of the film negative, housed in elegant cases, were planned to be presented to these polar explorers.

Deutsche Welle, in the above article, writes that it was conceived as a "full-length sound film". In animator.ru, it is catalogued under the title "Papanintsy" (Papanin's Crew). A 55-minute documentary film about the expedition with that name was in fact released in 1938, and can be viewed online. A likely possibility, therefore, seems to be that this cartoon was meant to be released in theatres together with that documentary film (before or after it).

It was planned to be a Union-wide release. Unlike Ukrainfilm's previous productions, which were in the Ukrainian language, this one was in Russian. In March 1938, Vechernyaya Moskva, the newspaper of the Moscow City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Moscow City Council, published a note by its Kyiv correspondent about the painstaking work on the cartoon: "The work was very complex. Nine artists had to make up to 20,000 drawings".

The film was finally digitized with support from the Dovzhenko Center in Kyiv, and shown in 2023 for the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage at the German Historical Museum. At the end of Dec 2024, the negative was among nine other historical Ukrainian films that was transferred from the Bundesarchiv to the Dovzhenko Center.