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.

Leopold has the best songs, and they're usually the highlight of this series for me. This episode has great music all around.



In other respects: the character design is nice enough and there are a lot of gags (hearkening back to what Soyuzmultfilm's production was like in the late 1930s), but the execution is kind of sloppy (and I thought so when I watched them back then, too! There were lots of mistakes I would notice). The size of the mice varies hugely again - from being almost as big as Leopold when they're on the motorcycle, to being the size of his feet when they climb up his trousers at the end!