Cabaret
Puppet Play
Балаган
Balagan (ru)
Retablillo (es)
32 visitors
Puppet Play
Балаган
Balagan (ru)
Retablillo (es)
| Year | 1981 |
| Director(s) | Garanina Ideya |
| Studio(s) | Soyuzmultfilm |
| Language(s) | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Comedy Literature (non-Rus./USSR) Musical/Opera Romance Serious Surrealism/dream-logic |
| Animation Type(s) | Puppet |
| Length | 00:20:40 |
| Wordiness | 6.07 |
| Animator.ru profile | Ru, En |
Subtitles:
⭳ Balagan.1981.en.1.23,976.1791695677.srt
Date: October 11 2026 05:14:37
Language: English
Quality: ok
Upload notes: 900 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan, Prisma International, Gwynne Edwards₂
⭳ Balagan.1981.es.1.23,976.1423306674.srt
Date: February 07 2015 10:57:54
Language: Spanish
Quality: unknown
Upload notes: 45 characters long (view)
Creator(s): ?, Prisma International₂
⭳ Balagan.1981.ru.1.23,976.1791693102.srt
Date: October 11 2026 04:31:42
Language: Russian
Quality: good
Upload notes: 58 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan
⭳ Balagan.1981.en.1.23,976.1791695677.srt
Date: October 11 2026 05:14:37
Language: English
Quality: ok
Upload notes: 900 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan, Prisma International, Gwynne Edwards₂
⭳ Balagan.1981.es.1.23,976.1423306674.srt
Date: February 07 2015 10:57:54
Language: Spanish
Quality: unknown
Upload notes: 45 characters long (view)
Creator(s): ?, Prisma International₂
⭳ Balagan.1981.ru.1.23,976.1791693102.srt
Date: October 11 2026 04:31:42
Language: Russian
Quality: good
Upload notes: 58 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan
Description:
When two puppets - Don Cristobal and Dona Rosita - decide to marry, the result is first a farce and then a tragedy. Based on the plays and poems of the Spanish author Federico García Lorca.
Lorca (1898-1936) was a gifted playwright and a communist who was (apparently) assassinated for his beliefs at the start of the Spanish Civil War. His complete works were translated and printed in the USSR. The translators localized his texts to an extent, and it was those Russian versions that served as the basis for the film's screenplay. The plays described below were first translated to English in 1990 by Gwynne Edwards in her book "Lorca. Plays: Two" (pp. 65-79, 43-64 & 1-42).
The first half of the film is based mainly on "The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal" (Retablillo de Don Cristóbal), written in 1931 and first performed in 1935. The original can be read here (PDF). It was translated to Russian in 1975 (read it here).
The first half ends with Don Cristobal waking up with horns on his head. In many European languages, including Spanish, Russian and also English, horns are associated with cuckolded husbands (men whose wives have cheated on them). See this article for details.
The second half is based mainly on the play "The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden" (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín), written 1928 and first performed 1933, but with the protagonists' names changed to Don Cristobal and Dona Rosita. The original can be read here (PDF) or here. It was translated to Russian in 1976 (read it here).
A few scattered bits of dialogue (including the one about "18 years") come from Lorca's play "The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife" (La zapatera prodigiosa). Original Spanish text here, Russian translation here.
The epilogue is a modified version of Lorca's poem "School" (original Spanish text, Russian translation, English #1, English #2). The Russian translation link also talks about the interesting backstory of this poem.
The film was first released in the West as part of Films By Jove's "Masters of Russian Animation" collection (in 1997 on VHS, and in 2000 on DVD), although the subtitled English translation then had some mistakes that may have made the film's logic hard to follow.
The first video above (19:53 long) is in high-definition but has inaccurate colours and is in the faster TV frame-rate of 25fps. Of the other two videos, one (20:50 long) has good colours and is close to the theatrical framerate (23.976fps), but has yellow English hard-subs that are sometimes very inaccurate. The other video (19:59 long, 25fps) has no hard-subs but its colours are too dull and the image is not very sharp.
DISCUSSION
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Starting to work on this one really involved going down a rabbit hole much deeper than I intended, and included tracking down three plays and a poem in 3 different languages. The screenplay is kind of ingenious in taking a bunch of different plays by Lorca and making connections between them. They do indeed have some plot similarities. All the same, the tonal shift between the brilliant, farcical and hilarious first half and the romantic, sombre and tragic second half is jarring. This movie is a real emotional roller coaster! Judging from the "5.6" user rating on Kinopoisk, not everyone appreciated that transition and some would have preferred for the film to have ended at the half-way point, before our main hero, Don Cristobal, cuts his own strings (IMDB's rating is a more generous "7.5").
Well, the first half is definitely memorable! It's hard for me not to notice the sheer virtuosity of what Garanina was trying to do with stop motion - all those camera movements, quick cuts, blurred motion, exquisite lighting... and those exquisite puppets! They were made by Lyudmila Soshinskaya, who mainly worked as a sculptor. Her works are on display at some of the most famous Russian galleries and museums.
The second half, meanwhile, reminds me of the slow pace and poetry that would show up later in sections of Garanina's 1988 animated feature The Cat Who Walked By Herself. From a farce, it turns into a surreal dream that speaks in the language of feelings. It does away with most of the details of the plot of the "Don Perlimplin" play it is based on (throwing away the important housekeeper character, for example, or the letters that the young woman received), narrowing the focus only to the emotional relationship between the two main characters. It's a hard thing to get right, though I think Garanina mainly succeeds. On the other hand, it might be too abstract for some.