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).

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.