From 1954-1961, Grigoriy Lomidze made a number of puppet films at Soyuzmultfilm that were mostly live action puppet theatre, with only a little bit of animation when it was absolutely unavoidable. He seems to have been the only director at the studio who chose to work this way. Compared to At a Summer Villa, which he had made the year before, the puppets in this one are a lot less expressive - their eyes and mouths don't really move. The script is basically fine, but the lack of expressive animation (or expressive live action puppetry) makes the way it is told too stiff for me. The limits of this approach are more obvious here than they were in his previous film, which probably even benefited from it.

I like this film, but I don't feel very qualified to comment on it. Instead, I'm going to post a translation of a quote from A. Prohorov's book "Режиссёры и художники советского мультипликационного кино" (Directors and Artists of Soviet Animated Cinema. Moscow, 1984) that is on the Russian Wikipedia article (I would love to get a copy of the book itself, but I can't find it anywhere, at least not online):

It was during this period that Kurchevsky turned "back": from the decorative quality of the puppet to its painterly quality, from an open but monotonous metaphor to the multifaceted and full-blooded nature of the material world. "The Handyman of Clamecy" (1972) is a work in which the entire film crew united in a careful love for R. Rolland's masterpiece and for Col Breugnon himself. The free-flowing, calm epic of Col's story contrasts with the metaphorical painterly quality. The contrast between the leisurely pace of the tale being told and the unusually active pressure of the world, depicted and pictorial, is one of the film's fundamental successes. [...] In "The Handyman of Clamecy," the director, addressing the problem of the painterly quality of the object and the mask, approached the aesthetics of a "living still life". The artistic paradox of bringing "dead nature" (which is how the word "still life" is translated from French) to life and spirituality lies in the fact that, while creating a spatial still life on a film set from streets, houses, interiors, and even human figures in their initially picturesque stillness, it is not so much animated mechanically, that is, by moving the puppets, but rather animated through internal, purely pictorial means of expression. V. Kurchevsky and art director T. Tezhik truly brilliantly resolved this contradiction. [...] Choosing Breugnon's appearance presented a very great challenge. The director and art director found an unexpected, perhaps even too unexpected, solution: Cézanne's self-portrait served as the portrait prototype for Col Breugnon. (Incidentally, when the film was shown in France, where it enjoyed great success with both the public and professionals, many filmmakers told the director that his Colas Breugnon vaguely reminded them of someone they knew very well, and, upon receiving the answer, gasped in surprise.) [...] The film "The Master of Clamecy" is not simply a successful adaptation of a literary masterpiece (which in itself is no small feat). Kurchevsky and Tezhik's work reveals new possibilities for three-dimensional animation in conveying philosophical reflections on life, in depicting tragedy concisely, in many ways that today still seem inaccessible to "puppet cinema". The lessons of "The Master of Clamecy," it seems to me, have not yet been fully absorbed by the all-powerful animation of the 1980s.

A lot of people have commented on the washbasin in this one looking rather creepy, and I agree! I'm glad that this film has been found finally, as it's an important part of Soviet animation history - it's the first Soviet puppet film, as far as I know. Benderskaya had to "reinvent" the technique, as it had been lost when Ladislas Starevich fled Russia with the other White emigres almost a decade prior. Her technique is cruder than his in many ways, although the addition of music (thank you, whoever at RuTracker added it) does make the film a lot more watchable than it was when I first tried to watch it the original, music-free version that was uploaded.

For the translation, I wanted to use the existing English translation of the story, but the intertitles were just too different, so I had to translate the entire thing anew. I tried to do it in the same spirit that I think it would have been done at the time - not as a one-for-one translation, but to give the same effect as the original. Besides, I translated mainly from the Russian text, which takes a similar approach from the Czech. And possibly the Czech intertitles did the same thing for the original Russian intertitles, which are lost. So trying to translate it with slavish accuracy didn't seem to make very much sense here, anyway. Still, I tried to keep within the ballpark.

A solid film by Tsehanovskiy (the second film he directed together with his wife), though I'd say not as good as most of his earlier ones. He was in his 70s by this point, and nearing the end of his career. He, perhaps, felt himself compelled to change his visual style compared to his films of the late 1940s and 1950s (this is much more sparse and stylized), but underneath that outer layer he still seems to have heavily used rotoscoping for much of the animation. It's especially noticeable in the dancing scenes.

Like in his 1944 film Telephone, he once again chose to include live action footage of the writer himself reading his own verse.

Tsehanovskiy reuses a famous scene from his first film, The Post (1929) a number of times, when the Fox and the Beaver are traveling in a train.

I don't know, I have some trouble judging this one. It's a good adaptation of the source material, and fleshes it out nicely, but also stays quite safe throughout. It lacks both the bold, grotesque drawing styles of his early films and the quiet, naturalistic beauty of his middle period.

An early, visually inventive film by Robert Saakyants. Quite a different style than his famous films of the 1980s, but very visually distinct all the same. This is the second film in which he used the "fox" character (the first one isn't on this site yet). It has a lot of visual experiments, but different than the ones he would use in the 1980s. Much more use of pop art and comic book art here (as in the constant use of dialogue bubbles). And rock music, of course. I think that his later films are still better, but this is an interesting one.

Two members of the crew here later became directors themselves: Gayane Martirosyan (from 1981 onwards, at Armenfilm) and Akop Kirakosyan (from 1989, at Soyuzmultfilm; he later also became head of the studio).

This entry is unusual for not having the "merry-go-round" appear in between the films, but only at the start and end. As for the films themselves, the first one is a very simple and abstract directorial debut by Gavrilko, probably the least fun of her films and interesting primarily for including the unusual music of Alfred Schnittke, who was also one of the favourite composers that Hrzhanovskiy used in his films. The second film by Gorlenko, about the crocodile and the bird, is a very hopeful representation of the Soviet ideal that nurture, not nature is what matters most (which when taken too far led to things like Lysenkoism). The film is well done but is ruined by its narrator, who sounds like a very uninterested woman who just wants to get this over with and would rather be anywhere else. I strongly suspect that the film was originally wordless, but somebody in management couldn't understand it (or thought that kids wouldn't be able to) and insisted on adding the narrator at the last minute. The last film, I think, has not much of a point to it beyond simply being extremely cutesy... it's Mazayev's first film and probably his worst. I haven't seen all of them yet, but all the others that I have seen are better.

The little heart symbol for this one was added solely on the basis of the final cartoon in this compilation by Eduard Nazarov, which is pure quality (and also the only one of his filmography that is directly set to a song, I think. His 1980s films have no off-screen music at all). The first cartoon by Leonid Kayukov, about a mean kid who ends up meeting someone he can't handle and then feels ashamed, has an art style transparently set up to appeal to little kids, and its blunt moralizing doesn't do much for me. The second film, also by Kayukov, about the clown, is pretty harmless and very short.
The film by Nazarov has excellent character design and animation, good music, and a really funny premise. Actually, it was pretty hard to translate the two opposite-words and make them rhyme in English. "delightful" and "frightful" come pretty close, but really the meanings are something like "excellent/lovely" and "awful".

I enjoy most Georgian animation of the 1950s, and this is no exception. All the human characters were rotoscoped (just like at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow), which led to a more serious and more dramatic pace of events. Compared to many of their films before and after, Georgian animation looked pretty good in this decade, though never as good as those of the perfectionist master of the rotoscoping method, Mihail Tsehanovskiy. So it is in this film, I sometimes noticed some perspective inconsistencies between the characters and the backgrounds - but nothing major enough to ruin my enjoyment of the film. The fight with the tiger was quite well done. Perhaps the film's biggest flaw is that, while the individual scenes itself are a good pace, it feels like it skips over some scenes simply because of the 10-minute time limit. It could easily have been 20 or 30 minutes, and would have probably been better.

Also, it looks like this particular film only appeared online this year, and this is the first-ever English translation of it.

I'm not sure what original Georgian fairy tale this is based on, as the only reference to "Marekh" the sorcerer I can find is here. I do know that fairy tales usually have things happen in groups of 3, while in this case he meets only two animals on the way - this again feels like a concession to the short running time.

Besides this and the similarly memorable Niko and Nikora, animator.ru says that Georgia Film also made Kursha in the same year (remade by the studio in a very different style 30 years later), but I have been unable to find even a screenshot of that cartoon. Maybe it will turn up one day...

Concerning the involvement of Norstein in the making of this film, his own words about it in this recent interview might be of interest. Relevant excerpt (30:35-31:05):

> "Потом меня Иванов-Вано пригласил вторым режиссёром на фильм "Времена года". Это по Чайковскому, его альбом "Времена года". Я там очень... Там была художник Марина Соколова. Я там очень много как режиссёр и придумал. И кроме того я по существу был основной мультипликатор, потому что там, хотя там нас три или четыре мультипликатора, но практически 90% снято моей рукой."

> "Then, Ivanov-Vano invited me to be a second director on the film "The Seasons". It is based on Tchaikovsky, on his suite "The Seasons". The artist [maybe "art director"?] on this film was Marina Sokolova. As a director, I brought in a lot. And aside from that, I was basically the main animator, because – although there were three or four of us animators – in practice, 90% was filmed by me."

An interesting historical artifact, surprisingly well preserved (aside from the unfortunate lack of sound... I wonder if any documents survive that say what it was going to be like?). I don't, at the moment, know the reasons for why it was abandoned so close to completion. Maybe simply because socialist realism was in vogue then, and there are no penguins in the Arctic? Or maybe there was a strict deadline and they were unable to finish in time. Whatever the reason, the studio made no animated films after that year. No animation would be made in Ukraine again until 1959.

The "plot" doesn't seem to have much to it, but I'll bet the musical numbers would have done a lot to liven it up. To me, the idea of making a cartoon about a daring scientific expedition feels unusual and fresh, despite how silly the plot is.

The animation doesn't seem as nice as in The Conceited Chick (1936) by the same studio. For the human characters (at least their bodies), they clearly used rotoscoping. I'd say the overall animation quality might be somewhat better than what Georgia Film was doing at the time, a little worse than Soyuzmultfilm's average in that year, and significantly worse than the only animated film from Lenfilm, Jabzha (a gem that deserved to be distributed wider than it was).

For comparison, here are all the films from 1938 currently on the site.