I think that this one is solid, but not brilliant. It's a kind of by-the-book adaptation. The story it's based on is quite well-written. The screenplay is good as well, following the original pretty closely. The art style is ok, but the late 1950s is probably my least favourite period of the Brumbergs' animation, as you still have the remains of realism (with rotoscoped characters) but the drawing style is much simplified and less interesting to look at compared to the late 1940s-early 1950s (to make each frame quicker to draw, I guess). Some other Soviet animation directors were doing the same thing as well in that period.

I think the king was a stronger character in the original story - it seemed like they weren't exactly sure what aspects focus on. He goes through the motions of the script, but doesn't really stand out as a character. Also, I think that in the original story it was bit of a running joke that "stoic down-to-earth salt-of-the-earth" Zerbino remains completely uncurious and unperturbed no matter what insane things happen around him, while that element is much less there in the cartoon.

As for the subtitles - like many of the other Brumberg films, I added this film to the site back before I decided on checking the quality of the English subtitles before adding any new film. So the subtitles that had been on the site for years were rated "unknown" (meaning, I had never checked them), but in fact were not very good; they were made in 2015 by Eus (a native Dutch-speaker with not-the-best command of Russian) on the basis of earlier subs by Zhurka75 (a native Russian-speaker with not-the-best command of English). I retranslated almost every line by consulting the Russian subtitles and the 19th-century English version of the story. I tried to stick to the 19th-century style of English for consistency, even when I changed the original lines to be closer to the actual Russian text.