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"?

A very non-Russian-feeling Russian cartoon, starting with the Halloween setting (which wasn't celebrated at all until pretty recently, and then only on a surface level).

After a very long time, I've finally translated another one of the lullabies from the "Lullabies of the World" series. This is the 23rd on the site, out of a total of 60 (the full list can be found here). Not all of them are as good, but this one is lovely. It speaks, entirely in visual language, of the little girl's worries about the future - in her dream, she casts off in her own boat (leaving home to start her own family), only for it to end in disaster. And when she tries to come back to her old home, there is no longer one to return to.

The lyrics are not really necessary for understanding the film, but they complement it and don't hurt, either. I've done my best to translate the song well, although I understand only a little bit of Portuguese.

>>6
Good news indeed! If it is actually well done it might make sense to add the video link. I haven't added the English dubs because they are not well done.

It would be great if somebody could transcribe the German translation and match it to the Russian version of the film, though I realize it would be a big job.

>>5
Good news: I finally found the original german dub for Mystery of the Third Planet! It was posted rather recently at the beginning of april on Youtube. Found it only by chance, when I was curious and tried finding german dubs of soviet cartoons, since germany was once occupied by the soviets for a long time and DEFA, the studio, which was founded in the soviet occupation zone in germany, was responsible for distributing many soviet films there. Also being able to speak not only russian, but also german, like I do, also played a part :).

Here's the link to the dub: link

The dub is pretty well done, competently made and not bad at all, voice actors are also doing a good job, though I would still rather watch this film in it's original language, simply by habit alone :).

Nevertheless it's a very cool curiosity for sure and though a few the attempts at translating the russian into german are clunky, it still has some charme to it and at least it is in my opinion better made than the german dub for ''The Little Humpbacked Horse''(1975). Also it's still bizarre to me seing something you grew up watching in your native language, only to discover it has a dub made for it in a foreign language you know, but only recently found out about it..

I will try and find other german dubs of other animated films on here and post the links to them in the comments under the respective films, simply out of curiosity and for the others, who might want to find out, how the films were translated into german and which changes they made to the dialogue, which I must imagine must be a real pain in the butt, because of the difficulty during the translation (since russian to german very untranslateable), though I'm sure that's not a new problem in dubbing.

Although the later 1950 film with the same name (which stays much closer to the original literary source) is probably better known, this earlier 1930s version (made in the first year of Soyuzmultfilm's existence, when it was still called Soyuzdetmultfilm) is a lot of fun. A great jazz soundtrack and lyrics. This was Ivanov's follow-up to his big hit of the year before, which has unfortunately been lost (only the 1950s remake survives). The animal musicians here are given a prominent appearance, though they originally have nothing to do with the story. But they were popular, so they were in! Much the same logic as the appearance of Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop in stories that had nothing to do with them in American animation, of which Ivanov was a big fan (and this was the main source of conflict between him and fellow director Ivanov-Vano - a conflict that Ivanov-Vano eventually won simply by living longer, and the escalating Cold War didn't hurt).

Like the later 1950 adaptation, I managed to translate this one in rhyme, with the same number of syllables per line, and close to the same meaning. I also, in a first for me, did it entirely while on an airplane, using the on-flight wifi.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't want to watch this one when I first came across it many years ago, just because I thought it looked too different from the original Dr. Seuss art style. Boy, was that a mistake! This is a great adaptation, even if it's not entirely faithful (for example, Thing One and Thing Two are missing - but, at least for my part, are not missed).

The art direction is great. The bright colours, strong lines and psychedelicism reminds me of Ugarov's Music Box with a Secret, while the character design and constant transformations reminds me of Saakyants' The Fox Who Couldn't Do Anything (both from 1976). It was done by Aleksandr Petrov before he felt he found his true voice as an artist. That came later that year on Night, directed by Vladimir Petkevich (who worked as an animator on this one).

I think it may also have been the first-ever Russian Dr. Seuss adaptation. At the time, Dr. Seuss was almost unknown in the Russian-speaking world, and Karayev only discovered him through the large collection of English-language children's books owned by the family of the famous children's writer Chukovsky. Karayev would go on to direct 3 more Dr. Seuss adaptations before (I'm guessing, but it's not unlikely) more stringent copyright enforcement on unlicensed adaptations by Western firms in the 1990s made it impossible to make any more. The one he made 2 years later, Welcome!, might be even better, although it's a close call.

The Animation Stories blog wrote a short review back in 2015, writing: "The theme of escaping into a land of fantasy from boredom of home or school is rather typical for the Soviet cartoons of the era of Stagnation, so Cat in Hat (Cap), with its protagonist, a safe entertainer who does not forget to clean the room before children's tired mother returns from work, falls perfectly within the scope of Soviet cartoons of that time."

Certainly the screenplay would have raised no concerns - it falls squarely into the broad, encouraged category of "stories that make children learn to be better people". I'm not sure if "escaping into a land of fantasy from boredom" was that common of a theme, though. I can think of Ara, bara, puch! (1986) by Vladimir Pekar, and Time Out (1984) by Priit Parn, but both of those are edging into the Perestroika era already, rather than the so-called "Stagnation" (as is true of this one, too). If you're really stretching, you might include Anatoliy Petrov's And Mama Will Forgive Me (1976), but boredom is really not the dominant theme of that one. I suppose you could also include Music Box with a Secret (1976), but again, boredom is not the reason for the escape into fantasy there. Well, I suppose Ugarov's At the Back of the Class series (1978-1985) also generally fits.

There are a few other animated films based on stories by Kharms currently on the site: The Journey (1989) and Pack! (1990). They're pretty interesting, and this one is as well, though maybe less so - but it definitely has fast-paced, dynamic animation, or the sort that was popular in much of the USSR (especially Ukraine and Russia) in the late 1980s-1990s, and mostly went away once artists switched to using computers. The director had worked on David Cherkasskiy's "Treasure Island" as an animator earlier. The film sticks pretty close to the original story, though the original story actually "ends" with the character falling to his death in the air. A bit of sick joke by Kharms to end the story there - I had to check to make sure that the page had not stopped loading!

5 minutes, 5 maritime safety skits. The animation is very well done and the writing is funny. Animator.ru lists this as the first film of Aleksey Karayev, but I don't know - they don't have a full filmography. Karayev created some of my favourite Russian animated films in the mid-1980s("Welcome" and "Lodgers of an Old House"). But he did these commissions for a bit at the beginning. They are generally pretty well done. He took a break from directing in the 1990s, coming back in the early 2000s, but I haven't liked his later films as much.

A fun little tale with some stylish animation. The director's first film. Her website says that she studied at the Animation Department at the Ural State Architecture and Arts Academy, and she thanks the other students from there in the credits, as well as Aleksey Karayev, a well-known Ural-based animation director who is a professor in the same Academy. So I suppose that the Pchela studio and this Academy collaborated, though only Pchela is listed as the studio.

There has been a trend in Russian animation schools, including in the Urals, of encouraging students to make work that will play well with international audiences (so: wordless, with an English title/credits, and maybe avoiding themes that are too "local"). I guess the hope is to have their students' work be seen in a larger pond, and to increase the chances for the students to get hired abroad. It worked for Chernysheva, as she now lives in France, and was even granted residency in Japan for a time.