Description:

The first film adaptation of Korney Chukovskiy's famous children's poem, about a boy who would not clean himself and had all his belongings run away from him.

The original poem was written in 1921 (though first published, with illustrations, in 1923). An English translation by Eugene Felgenhauer can be read here (or here).

For a long time, this film - which is also one of the earliest Soviet children's cartoons and puppet animations - was considered lost. Only a 20-second fragment was kept at the Gosfilmofond (the Russian State Film Archive). In 2007, a reel containing the cartoon, complete with intertitles in Czech, was discovered in the Czech National Film Archive and later transferred to the Gosfilmofond. The digitization was funded by participants of the Lost Media Wiki project: Yelizaveta Osipova (the 20-second fragment) and Oleznik Omeznik (the full Czech version). It was uploaded to YouTube on Jan 31, 2026. That version had no sound; the original score has presumably been lost. A few days later, another version was uploaded to RuTracker with an added piano soundtrack and Russian subtitles, and without the section at the start that explains the history of the film. This is the version that is above. The Czech title translates to "About Dirty Ivan".

Ivan Ivanov-Vano made two more animated adaptations of the story in 1939 and 1954 which are much more famous. Also, the Diafilm studio released filmstrip adaptations in 1963, 1969 and 1988. Since its initial publication, the original poem has been often reprinted and illustrated by many different artists.