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 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 mostly 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.

I'm not sure, but this is probably my favourite of the 7 short films that Bardin's made since his animated feature The Ugly Duckling in 2010. In a way, it might also be the hardest thing that he's attempted in that time, because he here is trying to pair a very gentle, heavenly almost ethereal music and painting with a down-to-earth animation technique to which those traits don't come very easily. The smallest wrong gesture, and you have a false note. Bardin himself (in the first interview linked in the description) admitted that he was scared to begin, but was so inspired by the music that he pushed through that fear. Generally speaking, I think he and his team managed quite well. Although I'm not sure that the water droplets near the end were best made in 3D - maybe having them painted on top (like they used to do in the 1980s) would have looked better.

This seems to have been a very turbulent production, with the entire studio production team leaving at one point. I'm not quite sure what happened after that and how the film ultimately got finished. Nor can I find out whether the film won any festival awards.

I recently realized (due to Georgiy Borodin's series of posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that this Sept. 11 had been Garri Bardin's 85th birthday, so I thought I'd add a number of his films that are not on the site yet. Starting with his most recent, released just a few months ago. His first was in 1975 (which I'll also try and subtitle soon), so at this point Bardin's career as director is one of the longest in Russian animation: 51 years, second only (I think) to the 57-year-long career of the Soviet animation patriarch, Ivan Ivanov-Vano.

Bardin started as a director of Soviet children's cartoons that were very much in the mainstream and didn't really stand out (positively or negatively). He had an early hit with The Flying Ship (1979), largely due to its catchy songs written by Yuriy Entin (who was responsible for a huge number of the well-known songs in Soviet animation). In 1983, he discovered stop motion animation, realized that he felt much more comfortable in it and never went back to 2D animation again. He also started winning awards at international film festivals around this time. His best period was probably in the 1990s and 2000s, when he got universal popular acclaim with the fun and kid-friendly Chucha trilogy as well as universal critical acclaim with the somber and serious Adagio. He spent the next 6 years working on an ambitious animated feature, The Ugly Duckling. It did poorly in Russian theatres, and public opinion was divided, though it did get some critical acclaim as well. After that, Bardin never attempted anything so ambitious again, but managed to continue making smaller films by becoming an expert at crowdfunding on planeta.ru (a bit like the Russian equivalent to Kickstarter). Bardin is one of the very few, or even the only, currently working animation directors in Russia who started working in the Soviet era yet are not funded by the government.

Like most of his recent films, this is a parable set to classical music. I think that it was also designed to be relatively simple to make and animate. Despite how simple and kind of abstract it is, I think it's nice. I like it more than his previous film. It could be read as a political commentary (due to the title and choice of music), but could just as easily be read as a universal message of what a man tends to encounter as he travels through life (though in that case, perhaps he should have started as a child and gradually become older throughout the film). Is what happens at the end really a solution though, or only an illusory solution? And if it's the latter, maybe it's good enough even so? In that sense, the message seems similar to me to the one in Stanislav Sokolov's animated feature Hoffmaniada (which is one of my favourite films of post-Soviet Russian animation, though I didn't initially think I would like it).

The one major thing I didn't like is that the credits at the beginning are very long and totally silent. They should have recorded the orchestra warming up and used that during the first 85 seconds.

As for the subtitles, I simply added them to translate the parts of the credits that are not already translated to English. The film itself is wordless.

A charming and magical, though slow-paced, cartoon for children. The characters are brothers who love each other and go on an adventure without the parents around.
Grachyova came back to the little bear character a number of times in her long career. Most of them are not on the site yet. Both the Russian and the Ukrainian voice actors did a nice job and I don't have a preference there, but the Ukrainian version has been scanned in nicer quality.

Probably my favourite of the films by Yuriy Butyrin that I've seen so far. Clever premise, and well-done execution. Thematically, reminded me a bit of Koshkin's Two Hands (1990), in that they both feature a boy with a grandmother who wishes he didn't have to do housework. And of course, even more recently, Pixar's 2008 animated feature "WALL-E".

Some Russian-language reviews of it can be found on irecommend.ru (also: kino-teatr.ru, otzovik.com, ivi.tv). I especially liked this one by Лариса111, which talks about the cartoon through the lens of the conflict between technological progress (including the current AI revolution) and the value humans derive from work.

By the way, the scene at 7:35, where the boy is traveling through a tunnel, is a reference to the similar scene in The Post (1929). And at 2:50, there are some vintage 1980s Soviet game arcade machines.

The film was hard-subbed by Zhurka75 back in 2013, but quite badly. I revised almost every line of that translation. Some things are impossible to get across in English, even so. Because Russian lacks articles such as "a, the", when the robot tells the boy "you will be like the Great Dontwanter", it is not quite clear whether he is saying "a great Dontwanter" (that is, that the boy will act like an excellent citizen of the land of Dontwanna) or "the Great Dontwanter" (that is, that the boy will follow the path of an actual existing person who is named that). The ambiguity is resolved only when the Great Dontwanter himself shows up. Unfortunately, there was no way to really do the same thing in English without being ungrammatical.

I think that this cartoon is excellent, and has some of the best traits of "mainstream" Soviet animation at the time (such as the Prostokvashino series). It has likeable (and well-animated) characters, and a kind and well-written story. Until just 2020, it wasn't even on the internet anywhere, and this HD video surfaced even more recently.

I want to thank Cynir very much for making Russian & English subtitles earlier this year. Only now did I get around to checking and correcting them.

A serious parable, like most of Tulyahodzhayev's films that I have seen so far. The illustrations are nice, but there is very little movement/animation (to save cost, no doubt). The way the main character is drawn reminds me of something I've seen somewhere, but I can't place it. Maybe some carvings on the walls of some Hindu temple?

The difficulty with the translation was getting it to rhyme and have the # of syllables match while keeping the meaning close. I think I managed it, mostly...

Tulyahodzhayev is mostly known for his famous There Will Come Soft Rains (1984), but in fact made films from 1979 to 2017. After the Soviet period, they were all in Uzbek and circulated only within the country, so it is harder to access them. In his filmography, though (see Wikipedia) there are a few notable gaps: 1993-1996 (which I assume had to do with the economic crisis of the time due to the USSR's collapse), and 2003-2005. The latter has to do with his (any many of his colleagues') conflict with Murad Muhammad-Dost, who was head of Uzbekkino at the time. In despair, Tulyahodzhayev wrote an article denouncing him in Mar 2004. Shortly after, he left Uzbekistan for Slovakia and traveled across Europe. In Sep 2005, he returned to Uzbekistan after Muhammad-Dost left his position, and resumed making films, starting with Bird (2006).

This one seems to be widely liked by "the faithful", and has probably won the most awards of all the director's films. In his interview, the director said that he thought this was the first "truly Orthodox" Russian animated film, but I wouldn't say that. Excellent earlier examples include Yuletide Stories (1994) and The Nativity (1996). But it may well be the first Russian animated film made by someone who was so closely tied to the Russian Orthodox Church, having previously given up animation for many years to do icon painting and illustration. I mean, there were previous examples... famously, Pilot Studio's Yuriy Pronin left secular life behind to paint icons and restore churches mid-way through production of Exhibition in 1995, forcing studio head Aleksandr Tatarskiy to complete his film for him. Yuriy Norshteyn's son became an icon painter. But this is probably the first example of someone coming back from that to animation, and bringing everything he learned with him to inform his film.

I think that the artwork is generally quite well-done, and the CGI-parts are mixed in with the rest decently well. Also, the various demons are quite creatively drawn!

The prayer of the ascetic in the middle section of the film (which you can hear only partly) is still not translated. If anyone can find the original source, please let me know.

A nice interview with the director here, though it is about his earlier 2007 film. Still it has some revealing information about his artistic journey and the style he chose, which applies here as well. I'm quoting a translated portion below, but the whole interview is interesting. Podivilov is, to this day, making films, and there's still a gulf between him and the rest of the Russian "animation community" (which, I get the impression, doesn't really approve of his films).

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You've probably been drawing since childhood?

It came from my father. He drew beautifully and would have become a professional artist if he'd had an education. But the war intervened. I was born in Chelyabinsk, also known as Tankograd (Tank-city). My grandfather assembled tanks there during the war and died in 1944 right next to the assembly line—a common occurrence in those days. The family was left without a breadwinner, so my father couldn't study to be an artist and went to work at a factory. But he was able to provide an education for my brother and me: first at art school, then at the Chelyabinsk Art College. After my military service, I studied at VGIK and then completed graduate school at the Advanced Courses for Directors and Screenwriters at the Russian State Film Agency.

Did you study animation there?

Yes, I specialized in it. But after I finished the course in 1999 and participated in several film festivals, I became disillusioned with animation." More precisely, in the kind of animation that an artist creates for the sake of form, for the sake of a "new statement" in visual style. And many people pursue that. For me personally, I saw it as a dead end. And so I left filmmaking altogether. It was a period of searching and then my coming to the Church. I took up book illustration and studied icon painting. A priest blessed me, and I began painting icons for various parishes and monasteries. I received commissions, and I simply gave away some of my works after pilgrimages. I visited many monasteries, including Diveyevo and in the North — in Valaam, in the Leningrad Region. And so it was that through icons, that I returned to filmmaking, to animation.

Were you baptized as a child or as an adult?

It's a long story, my journey to God. It all began with the thought of death, which came to me at the age of five. I saw my grandfather and grandmother die, and I wondered: what's out there, beyond the "edge"? I'm 42 now, so my childhood and adolescence were spent during the Soviet era. Back then, the very question of the afterlife was unheard of, let alone an answer. I remember from childhood how my parents were afraid to talk about it. It was quite possible to lose my job. My grandmother, in the village where I spent every summer, had icons in her house. She was a believer and prayed. And my first encounter with Orthodoxy, of course, happened then. No one explained the details to me, but I understood that God existed somewhere. Later, in Moscow, this first childhood experience became decisive in my life. And then came 1988, when spirituality began to be discussed openly, and the search for meaning was underway. I had just returned from the army, entered VGIK, and immersed myself in Eastern teachings. But I didn't find a full answer to the questions that tormented me there. Moreover, it only drove my soul to the brink. And at the most critical moment in my life, that childhood experience of contact with God helped me shift my focus from occult practices to the Orthodox Church. Only in the Church do I now find worthy answers to my most important questions. Everything falls into place. Peace is restored in my soul.

The cartoon "Your Cross" is clearly influenced by iconography. But I also noticed a certain "childish realism" – the drawings are deliberately not realistic, but rather emphatically drawn. It's as if a teenager tried to draw "exactly like life," but the handcrafted quality of the drawings remains. Did you develop this style specifically for "Your Cross," or is it your own style?

Yes, there are elements of iconography and, I believe, naive art. I believe each work requires its own unique form. I also tried to develop a technique that would make the drawings "alive." If you look closely, you'll notice this effect: each image, each phase of the animated image, seems to be painted with watercolors on paper. On the one hand, this creates a shimmer in the frame, meaning the texture is alive. On the other hand, I thereby moved away from the glossy quality characteristic of classic flat animation, such as Disney films. When Disney developed his technology, it was oriented toward particular, Disney-specific themes. It was completely unsuitable for "Your Cross." And no matter what we draw in the Disney style, subconsciously it will always be perceived in the context of a fairy tale or entertainment. Therefore, to break the stereotype of animation as entertainment, a different form had to be invented. Thus, a kind of synthesis of iconography, naive art, and watercolor was born.

An impressively-produced film. Most people seem to like it (its rating on Kinopoisk is about 7.8), though opinion is somewhat polarized and mixed. Generally speaking, many people tend to like it in proportion to how they feel about the Russian Orthodox Church. Some prefer the Soviet animated film about this battle, "The Battle of Nepryavda" (not on the site yet). There is quite a lot of discussion about its merits and of how historical it is on RuTracker. As for myself, I think that even if parts of the story are not true, it's still educational because it shows what the official state church and those who believe in its mission believe to be true and important. You can tell that many people thought this story was worth telling, and worth telling in this specific format, both by the official support from the Moscow Patriarchate and by just the sheer amount of human time that was visibly spent on it. The art style is like little else in contemporary Russian animation (except for Podivilov's other animated films), but it didn't come from nowhere - it reminds me of the art inside and on the covers of Russian Orthodox Church pamphlets that are handed out on visits to their services. It lacks anatomical exaggeration, has many lines and shading, and so is not very well-suited to animation; but they made these images move despite all that, which took a lot of work - see how long and dense the credits are...
It's also unusual in that it doesn't flinch away from the portrayal of violence, and has some real emotional impact...
I was a bit confused about aspects of the story, though this may become clear if I watch it again. I thought that the story of the two boys who decide to sneak off to join the adult men in their battle was handled quite well.
Some odd things I noticed are a frequent "stodginess" in how characters move, even in battle scenes. Also, many of the voice actors sound like religious men, not necessarily men of action (as the warriors depicted in the film might be).

The translation was pretty difficult, as the Russian language used in the film is pretty archaic and has many turns of phrase that are currently uncommon. They also usually don't map neatly onto English (at least, not without sounding very awkward and unnatural), so any translation will be to some degree a paraphrase. The original translation by Eus made in 2019 had very many mistakes and misunderstandings. A Greek Orthodox account named "pankrestos" uploaded a much better hardsubbed translation to YouTube in Nov 2023, though some mistranslations remained. I tried my best to improve on it further. There's one place at 13:14 where the words could not be made out. Some aspects of the translation are a matter of opinion. For example, the last word of the English translations of John 15:13 is usually "friends" but pankrestos had translated it "fellow man". The title of Sergey (Sergius) at the monastery is sometimes translated "Elder" and sometimes "Father". The translation of Knyaz (who leads to Russian uprising against the Mongols here) is sometimes "Grand Prince" and sometimes "Grand Duke" in English (the latter was chosen here).