The piano playing in this one is great, and Kovalevskaya does a pretty good job of arranging the story to fit the music. It's as good a depiction of Baba Yaga and her hut as any you're likely to find. I do wish that the drawing style was just a little less cutesy, though. I'm not sure why this one was 6 minutes instead of the typical 10-minute length. I wonder if something was cut?

The 5th film made by the duo of Pekar and Popov. Very strong influence of the American UPA "limited animation" style here. Reminds me of some other films in a similar style made around the same time (e.g. Anatoliy Petrov's First). Sort of a wacky Looney Tunes-style film made mainly to entertain and without any real lesson (unless it's "be kind to animals", I guess?). I much prefer the film they made immediately after this one (Umka), which is a real classic.

And with this film, every Soviet cartoon released in 1946 (there were only 7) has now been translated. Though it's not my favourite of them, it's charming in its own way, especially the granny and granddaughter. Aleksandr Ivanov was a big fan of "the Disney style" and you can really tell. In later years, as relations with the US worsened and people at the studio began to critique Disney artistically as well, he was made to tone it down (most dramatically in the 1949 film Polkan and Shavka). The ending of the fairy tale is rather harsh by today's standards, but this was just after the great war, after all.

The film itself is decently well-done despite the obviously very limited resources used to create it. It really highlights, though, how great the difference in production values could be between the central studios in Moscow and more regional and amateur productions. Around this time is when new animation studios were being founded in the capitals most of the other Soviet Republics, and they seem to have actually had decent resources. They always used colour film stock, for one thing. But this did not apply to the city of Perm. The studio this actually most reminds me of is the People's Film Studio of the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. Their earliest (apparently) film was also made in the same year, and is a bit similar in how it was made.

Nothing astonishing, but a good, simple and charming children's cartoon by Aleksandr Viken. The relationship between the kitten and the puppy reminds me a bit of Lev Atamanov's excellent series The Kitten Named Woof (1976-1982), which would have been quite popular at the time this was being made.

Viken's filmography is split about 50/50 between the ones aimed at children and the ones aimed at adults, but I think he generally did a fairly good job at both, at least during the Soviet period. He directed some more films in the 1990s (Ukrainian Wikipedia has a full list) but I've only seen "Little Bohdan and the Drum" so far, and I didn't think that one was so good.

Another in a series of obscure, (relatively) recently rediscovered old Ukrainian animations. :) Unfortunately, the ending of this one is missing - I'm not sure why. Big thanks to ayri and (especially) Daien, who managed to decipher the words despite the sound quality being really awful! Unfortunately, there's still one word in the last line that we're unsure about.

I was planning to write more about the history of this cartoon (as it has an interesting story and a few mysteries), but I'll do that a bit later...

There is nothing that actually happens in the film, and the tension is built entirely on the contrast between the serene domestic scene that is shown and the bitter words of the poem. The artwork is quite lovely. It is a mood-poem more than a story. In a way, it reminds me of the various short paint-animated poems made by Vladimir Samsonov for TV in the early 1980s (e.g. Mood, Highlights). Except that those were wordless and never negative.

None of the existing English translations of the poem seemed to be very good, so I tried to make my own, sometimes using bits of the existing ones (notes in the subtitle description). I think it's still not that great (especially the middle stanzas), but hopefully it's not completely jarring, at least.

This short film was made in 2021, and Filippova has not made any film since. However, there is an advertisement from last year of a plasticine animation course that she is teaching at Moscow's B&D Institute of Business and Design.

Although technically well done, I can't really understand who the intended audience is. The story is told in a very childish way, but the script makes reference to all sorts of everyday details of contemporary Soviet life that a child would not be familiar with. The result is just kind of odd - neither a children's film, nor an adult one. Not bad, but not my favourite of Davydov's films (which would probably be the "Mowgli" series).

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.