Animatsiya - Thảo luận

1. Admin 2026-10-14 20:35:04

A surprisingly nice short sci-fi animation from Armenia. The art style and animation are pretty otherworldly, but despite this, the main characters move well and the plot ends up being pretty understandable, despite no dialogue being spoken. The first time I watched it, it was in atrocious video quality and it was very hard to tell what was going on. The new 2023 scan by the RuTracker film archivists made things a lot clearer.

For some reason, despite being distributed in the RSFSR (see: the Russian credits in the nice scan), it lacks an animator.ru entry. It does list two other films directed by him, which I haven't watched yet. Neither seems to have had a nice scan done, though.

1. Admin 2026-10-11 00:22:21 (đã hiệu đính 2026-10-11 00:37:49)

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.

2. Admin 2026-10-05 01:06:07 (đã hiệu đính 2026-10-05 01:26:29)

>>1

1. Admin 2026-09-15 22:55:04 (edited 2026-09-15 23:01:22)

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.

>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.

Ok, I need to correct this. Andrey Hrzhanovskiy holds the #2 spot - he directed from 1966-2020, so 54 years. He was working on another feature film, too, but I doubt that will be finished now that he's emigrated to Israel and it lost its Russian state funding.

Close behind Bardin is Stanislav Sokolov, who began directing in 1976 (if you count a Moldovan Brandy commercial) or 1977, and is currently woefully underrepresented on this site (though I love his "Hoffmaniada"). He also released a film recently, a 20-minute pilot for his "Bulgakov" animated feature which he claimed could be finished "around 2031". It's very possible that it will be. He managed to complete "Hoffmaniada" even though production often stopped and it took 17 years, after all.

1. Admin 2026-10-04 22:47:46 (đã hiệu đính 2026-10-04 22:51:33)

A pleasant pair of two short films based on children's poems. The second is yet another little-known early entry in Bardin's filmography, being translated for the first time. The first film, though based on a poem, is wordless... while the second is narrated by its director (why not? Bardin was an actor before he started directing at Soyuzmultfilm, so he could do double duty). The art direction in both films looks pretty nice, though especially in the second one - quite a contrast to Bardin's preferences once he moved into stop motion animation! In the first film, the little instrument that the baby duck is given looks like a bugle or trumpet but sounds like a badly-played slide whistle. I don't really know what it's supposed to be and so I really wasn't sure that "pipe" was the right word for the translation. This was Olga Orlova's second film and (apparently) the last she would direct until 1994.

1. Admin 2026-09-19 22:57:14 (đã hiệu đính 2026-09-19 23:08:24)

Milchin was a well-liked director, but I admittedly don't like many of his films all that much. In this one, nothing bad happens to anyone, which gives it a sort of overly-sugary feeling. It's nice that the boy returned the umbrella to its owner at the end, but he should have done that to begin with, even if that downpour of rain at the end seems to have been, like many things in the film, entirely imaginary (since the old lady isn't wet at all when the umbrella is returned to her). It feels like there's supposed to be some vague lesson here; the boy feels guilty and heads off to return the umbrella at one point... but apparently he could have just safely kept on playing. There's no real human interaction between the boy and anyone - he's daydreaming and playing by himself for basically the entire film.

On the other hand, animation film critic Sergey Aseninin his 1971 book "Magicians of the Screen" (Волшебники экрана) has only nice things to say about this one (on pp. 208-209), calling it an example of Romanticism in children's animation, and praising the "clarity and precision of its visual language". He's especially fond of the part at the end where the boy boldly walks through the rain under the magical umbrella that hovers above him, with more and more wet toys joining his march. I like admittedly like that scene as well. Although while watching it, I was also thinking "stop getting distracted already, return the umbrella to the old lady who is probably getting wet!"

1. Admin 2026-09-18 23:58:01

A quirky, visually inventive animated film, or the sort that started becoming popular for artists to make in the USSR in the 1980s. According to Gorlenko's interview in Sergey Kapkov's book "The Legends of Soyuzmultfilm" (which can also be read here), he tried to tell this story without words, but in his opinion he failed, and the mouse's lesson doesn't come across visually. I thought it was perfectly understandable when I watched it for the first time, though. There's a nice scene at 8:57, in which you can see the entire "circle of kindness", that hammers the lesson home.

2. davidmouse8 2026-09-18 02:56:47

>>1
even the background music can sometimes be good

1. Admin 2026-09-18 00:11:56 (đã hiệu đính 2026-09-18 22:44:48)

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.

1. Admin 2026-09-16 23:45:24 (đã hiệu đính 2026-09-18 22:49:11)

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.

1. Admin 2026-09-15 22:55:04 (đã hiệu đính 2026-09-15 23:01:22)

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.

Replies: >>2

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