Bardin's first film (as director) is not very well known - in fact, I think this is the first time it has been subtitled. There's nothing especially wrong with it - it's a decent and decently charming story aimed at little children, and the art direction is nice. But it doesn't really stand out, either. Maybe this is partly because it lacks any memorable songs or melodies; the music is just really these occasional strange, discordant fragments of notes played on a synthesizer. I suppose it's meant to sound spacey.

The concepts of stars, space travel and cosmonauts are heavily simplified and little-kid-ified. This is also true for the most famous animated Soviet sci-fi, The Secret of the Third Planet (1981), whose story has birds that can fly between the stars, but it's even more the case here. I mean, the cosmonaut literally travels with his rocket (which is just slightly bigger than him) on a little dolly cart!

The translation wasn't especially hard, but it did have a few tricky bits. One of them comes at 3:47, in which the street sweeper says a common little rhyme "Что упало, то пропало" (literally "What falls down is lost (done for)", which means something like "You can't unscramble an egg"). I couldn't think of a good fit in English, so ultimately chose "What falls to the street is mine to sweep". At 4:16, the kids visit the Repair Bureau - these were state-run "service centers" to which one could take broken items (such as electronics, etc.) to be repaired. There was and is no exact Western equivalent, so I just hope the meaning is clear enough. At 7:10, one little kid's suggestion to "divide it up" - in English, one usually says "to share" in a similar context. But in this case, that didn't really work and I had to use the less common phrasing.