A very pretty film, with bright colours and attractive design. The characters also move better than in Salimov's film of the previous year.

The idea of telling a story about cuckoos' egg-laying habits doesn't mesh well with communist ideology and its belief in nurture over nature (a mainstream belief in many places today, too). Whether it was because of this factor or not (was the script modified from the initial proposal?), the story ends up being more complex and multilayered than it first seems it will be. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it until I started thinking about the nightingale's final verses at the end ("What's born of good is good, / And evil begets evil"). Although the film shows literally how the yellow chicks are "born good" and the cuckoo chicks are "born evil" from their respective biological parents, it also shows a different type of birth, one that is based on memetic rather than biological transmission: the love of the adoptive parents is echoed in the good and heroic final actions of at least one of the cuckoo chicks. And on the other side, the cuckoo birds' evil scheme leads the generally "good" smaller bird parents into the horrible (if partly justified) decision to attempt to lynch both the cuckoo chicks and their confused adoptive parents.

It's also a bit ironic that it is precisely the nightingale's beautiful voice and verse that inspire the small birds to begin their attack.

So I think that the film also argues against the purity of "good" and "evil", and shows that each quality can also exist in its "opposite" (like in the famous yin and yang symbol) and can be "birthed" under the right circumstances.

I find the relative complexity interesting. But it does mean that neither "side" in the political/social debates about these issues (I doubt I need to specify what I'm talking about), if they manage to understand what it is saying in the first place, is likely to find this film satisfying.

The translation was a bit tricky because some of it was rhymed, but I think I ultimately came pretty close.