The music, the screenplay, the direction and the camera work & scene layout are all pretty good. But I think the puppets and their animation lack the expressiveness to really make it work well.

There is none of the brilliant animation that can be seen in Roman Kachanov's puppet films. And no wonder, considering how rushed this production was. In the article linked above, Migunov wrote about how the team of Grigoriy Lomidze, which was working with live-action puppets and easily meeting all the deadlines (and hadn't had to set up an entire new production line), was getting all the praise from management.

He had tons of trouble getting a cast of the main character:

Besides the miniature and complex molds, we had to ensure the casting surface was flawless, as straightening was out of the question. And casting after casting failed. (We tried to find a way to manufacture rubber toys in a factory, but that required a metal mold for vulcanization, which was completely beyond our capabilities! So our only option was latex!)

I gradually began to get nervous. Deadlines were pressing, management was furious, and the workshop couldn't cope.

[...]

But finally, a more or less high-quality casting was achieved.
With bated breath, I began installation. And discovered I had miscalculated the shrinkage of the latex. It turns out that as it dries, it shrinks significantly over time: it shrinks almost twice as much. Who could have foreseen this? The mold was made with some allowance. But for the allowance to be so large...

I almost lost it. Somehow, by filing down the pins and shortening the frame levers, I managed to dress my hero. What's more, I even managed to insert a special mimic mechanism into the head, activated by a hidden screw on the back of the head. With great difficulty, the hero was born. Another problem emerged: latex can't be painted. Oil eats away at it. Gouache crumbles. Only special makeup made from pig fat or spermaceti has no effect on latex. But then again - it smears when touched.... Well, could there be a better cure for sleep?

I turned blue and my heart began to skip beats. [Studio director] Sinitsyn, as if sensing this, called me every day, several times a day, constantly taunting me with obscenities. One night (though later, at the end of filming), he got in a full charge. Burlakov - the production director of my picture - didn't have time to cut the line, but rushed to it when he realized I was about to recite my own piece. The recitation was impressive. Later, when I finished and handed in the picture, Sinitsyn told me he thought he'd dreamed the whole thing...

He was also unhappy about the animator:

Vadim Dolgikh was assigned to me - a very mediocre animator, to say the least. Lazy and lacking initiative, he brought no benefit to the film. And if he did contribute anything, it was only quantitative, but not qualitative. He was not subtle, not intuitive, not artistic. I tried to persuade Boris Dyozhkin to try moving things around. But, first of all, there was nothing to move yet. And, having familiarized himself with the armature (the spare one), he fiddled with it a little, apparently enjoying himself, but for some reason eluded any serious work.

Really a lovely tale!

The bell reminded me of a cursorily similar motif in the ending of "Lu Ling" (鹿铃, 'Deer Bell').

In that Chinese film, of course, the protagonist lets her new friend go and is left with a sweet memory instead of a bitter one.

>>4
>Are the animals in the front row caricatures of Soviet music critics from the period?
I don't know...

I think (after reading what they wrote) that both the positive and negative critics have some good points, but overall this is a decent and charming film for very little kids. I'd put it about on par with one of Kachanov's early films, "Novice" (1961). The screenplay does a good job of expanding the original basic fairy tale by giving some more characterization to the bears before the scenes with the fox happen, while the art direction does try a bit too hard to be "naturalistic".

It was a decent start to Soyuzmultfilm's puppet tradition, even if it isn't as good as the films of Starevich in the 1910s or Ptushko & co. at Mosfilm in the 1930s.

I think this is the worst "animated" (if you can call it that) Soviet film released in 1954. Interesting maybe for historical reasons (and Stepantsev's debut as director), and maybe to get a small hint of the vibe of everyday life at the time, but not much else. Slow, plodding, lacking in subtlety and heavy-handed. This is the film that actually conforms to every negative stereotype that the uninformed have about Soviet cinema. The other social satire in that year's almanac, The Signature is Illegible, is so much better.

I'm sure it's partly due to the technique (live-action puppets are limited in what you can do with them), but the other film in this technique released that year, At a Summer Villa, is also much more interesting.

>>1
Heh. Well, no, I think it's just an adult hare; they're all very little, so he looks huge. But he's only a little bigger than the mother (at 7:34).

Although this adaptation is competently done, has some excellent singing and is considered a classic, I must admit that I find it a bit drawn out and dry myself. It's just extremely straightforward. It's an adaptation of a famous Chukovsky poem, of course, but I like some of the illustrated book editions more (such as the one illustrated by Yevgeniy Antonenkov), as they feel more playful.

As for animation, I much prefer the film Ivanov-Vano directed the following year. And in 1954, too, although it was a bit of a "dry" year in general, there are others I like better. Including "The Frog Princess", "Niko and Nikora", "The Signature is Illegible", "In the Heart of the Forest".

Rescued by a hare the size of a wolf. ????

Are the animals in the front row caricatures of Soviet music critics from the period?

Though the early Merry-Go-Rounds (from the 1960s) are more famous, I think they continued to be pretty good even as the studio began falling apart in the 1990s. This one is a good example - all of the entries are pretty strong. For the last, this isn't surprising and its director (Golovanova) was a veteran. But the first two are strong first works by new directors.

The style of the first should be immediately recognizable for fans of Vladimir Tarasov, as Koshkin was his art director, and a big part of what made those films so great. So it is here - the story could easily be boring, but the well-drawn art, characters, and inventive camera angles make it shine. Unfortunately, Koshkin never did get the chance to do any more directing.

The other new director, Guryev, was more lucky. His segment here adapts a literary original that is practically unadaptable (because it's like a miniature "Finnegans Wake", relying heavily on wordplay and things you can only do in writing), and he solved the problem by almost ignoring the text and doing a similar thing purely with visuals. How do you even animate things seen through warped glass? I can't imagine. The fat cat would reappear in Guryev's later work.

"Little Ram" is an English absurdity - actually, far more absurd in the adaptation here than the original folk song is. There seems to be a lot of love for English absurdity in Russia (I could name quite a few animated examples, starting with the 1970s works of Andrey Hrzhanovskiy), and in the early 1990s it seems to have been especially trendy.