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).

There's nothing especially outstanding about this puppet cartoon - I think it's quite average for the time. But it's kind-hearted and charming.

The art direction is really pretty in places here. The musical performance is well done. The story is very slight, as is typical for Kovalevskaya. You might call it a "minimum viable story" - just enough to have an excuse for the characters moving to the music, and not much more. Something about her films reminds me of Boris Dyozhkin's. Both of them liked their plots simple and their animated characters moving to music as often as possible. Though Dyozhkin had an interest in sports that Kovalevskaya didn't, while Kovalevskaya had an interest in catchy vocal songs and classical music that Dyozhkin didn't.

One of Kovalevskaya's series of cartoons adapting famous classical music. Wordless except for the names of the pieces played.

I like the performance of the music and the overall idea. I also really like the art style of the domestic scenes. It's interesting that an orchestration of the piano piece was commissioned especially for this film, so that the piano version is heard only in the "real world" a few times, while the rest of the time, when we're in the "land of imagination", we hear the orchestral version. All the same, part of me wishes to have just heard the original.

I don't like the art style of the imagined scenes very much - I think it is much too cutesy, but more importantly it doesn't match the era that the story is set in. It would've been much more interesting if the art style had been similar to actual children's drawings from the late 19th century. I think it would have helped set the right mood, like it did in Leonid Amalrik's The Girl and the Elephant (1969) (though that's not children's art, and is from a bit later - about the 1910s).

This is definitely for little children, but it's a sweet and well-done example of that type of cartoon. And the art style is very pleasant; very typically 1960s, but one of the best from that decade. I think this may be one of Kovalevskaya's nicest films, even though it seems to be little-known and was just the second one she ever directed. Unlike many of her later and more famous films, it doesn't have any outstandingly memorable songs (the one it does have is nice enough, but not amazing).

Kovalevskaya returned to a very similar plot in 2002 for her very last film (which has not been subtitled yet).

The translation for this one was not especially difficult. The longest part was the song, which was kinda-sorta made to rhyme (if you're not very picky about what constitutes a "rhyme").

Certainly one of the best entries in Animos studio's "Russian Classics for Children" series. This film is so rich, and everything (acting, art direction, screenplay, music) seems to be in top form here. Nor does it simplify the material or seem to speak down to its audience, like some of the other films in the series. The source material is curious - a story written by a writer who left Russia because of the Revolution. Not something that could have been adapted during Soviet times, I think. Eus, who originally submitted this (and may have made the first version of the English subtitles, 13 years ago) wrote "Personally this animation made me understand the Russian obsession with/enchantment by an even more famous Russian Poet & Writer: Aleksandr Pushkin".

I will say, though, if showing this to children, it probably helps if they are familiar with the Krylov fable in question (though that is very likely to already be the case, if they are Russian).

There is no great English translation of the original Krylov fable that I've found online, by the way. Perhaps the one by Lydia Razran Stone in the book "The Frogs Who Begged For A Tsar (And 61 Other Russian Fables)" is good (because some of the others in the book sample seem nice enough), but it can't be found online.

This is probably the strangest of Animos studio's puppet animations that I've seen so far. The fairy tale that it is based on is itself profoundly strange and frightening, but at least supposedly takes place in "our" world. The screenplay makes it even more strange by making the girl live in some sort of different dimension (moreover, it is not at all clear how she ended up there), and by having her cow's ear be the passageway to a nicer world. In the original tale, the three evil stepsisters are just nasty women rather than spider-monsters. There are a lot of things in this adaptation that make more sense symbolically than logically. In some ways, it reminds me of the 2009 American puppet-animated feature, "Coraline".

Unfortunately, it seems like this was the last puppet animation that Mihaylova made. Her next project was the 2D animated feature "Buratino's Return" that came out 6 years later, which seems to not have been well-liked. I'm not sure, but it may be that Animos studio as a whole also stopped making puppet animation around this time.

I couldn't find any version of this without the English hard-subs. The translation in them was a bit ungrammatical though, so I fixed it up somewhat.

A more mature and ambitious film from Kravchenko than the one made 10 years before. The story is told competently, though the genre (a fairy tale with a moral) is likely the most common one in Russian animation. The visual style is probably the most interesting part. I also liked some of the little touches, like the animals responding to the bows of the little bird with their own bows. I couldn't find the film on YouTube, but the director uploaded it to his own VK channel.

I updated the description after I read a very informative article about Tarasov published by Georgiy Borodin earlier this year. At that link, you can see screenshots of some scenes that have been cut from the version of the film above.

Also, it seems that this was part of a bigger international project, and that other countries also made similar films at the time. I wonder what their names are, and if any of those have survived?

It is still unclear what the anniversary was supposed to be. Borodin's article says it was meant to be "the 100th anniversary of the birth of animation", but I am unaware of anything that happened in 1883 specifically.

I learned something relevant today. Boris Dyozhkin and Gennadiy Filippov created a cartoon with a very similar plot in 1937 at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow (for Dyozhkin, the studio's star animator, it was the first time he directed): Привет героям! (Greetings to the Heroes!). Dyozhkin had heard about the success of the Arctic expedition, and burned with the desire to commemorate it. He called on Filippov, who found a composer, and they locked themselves in their room with bread and water and finished animating the movie in just 7 days! (as related by Dyozhkin's wife in her interview with Sergey Kapkov, which I read in his 2025 book "The Legends of Soyuzmultfilm Studio", p. 55) It was not in the studio plan, but the management had no choice but to accept the film, which was well liked by viewers. However, it apparently has not survived at all, not even a still image from it!

So, I was thinking: this Ukrainian cartoon from Odessa was likely inspired by the earlier one made in Moscow. Maybe that could even be one of the reasons it wasn't allowed to be finished? Did some higher-up say "we already have something similar"?