>>3
Thanks for those videos! How odd to see Vietnamese "Nu, pogodi" sequels! I assumed those 4 videos weren't originally widescreen (they were for TV, weren't they?), so I viewed them through the DIY page here and set the "Adjust aspect ratio" to "0.75" to get the correct width.

Yes, I can see the resemblance. Though I don't think the animation style itself was influenced by the Soviet Union, just the characters! The weightlessness and really loose drawing style also reminds me of the early Georgia Film animated films from the 1930s and 1940s (although those had a higher budget). Like these ones up on culture.ru:
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19066/argonavty-kolkhida
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19058/proidokha-khitraya-lisica
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19065/yunyi-strelok-voroshilovskii-strelok
https://www.culture.ru/live/movies/19064/chiora-dostoinyi-otvet

And this one on Animatsiya (the earliest one on this site currently)
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=878

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-_MylNvXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0guWnH4tQNU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvKTsuJkxvA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8bRkE76wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPxevUeeU-Q

I found this film to be very unique to all of the Middle Eastern cinema. This was also the style of Vietnamese animation in the 1980s and 1990s which was influenced by the Soviet Union, of course.

Sheesh, some of these late Soviet Georgia-Film cartoons are really hard to look at...
It kind of seems like in the 1980s, they often stopped caring about drawing well and the quality of the animation degraded down to the studio's beginnings in the 1930s/1940s (or worse). It seems like they took longer to get the animation looking nice than most of the other studios, and then they backslid faster once country-wide standards began to slip (despite some great output in the mid 1950s and even some into the early 1980s).

Maybe the much simplified style used by directors such as Bondo Shoshitaishvili and Konstantin Matsaberidze in the 1970s is to blame.

I think Samsonadze's films were interesting in the 1970s but get noticeably worse as the 1980s go on (was it a general tendency of Georgia-Film as a whole?). The art style becomes cruder and the animation less smooth (in general, it seems to become more amateurish, like when the studio was just starting out in the 1930s and 1940s).

Allegedly based on something written by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani (1658-1725). However, I haven't been able to track down the source - if anyone knows, please let me know.

The first cartoon by Leonid Zarubin added here. He directed 26 films, but I've never seen any of them before. Honestly, I only added this one because it was easy to translate - it's not exactly bad, but nor is it that interesting.

Of his films on animator.ru, Oleshka Belyye rozhki has some interesting screenshots at least - I might check that one out.

Thank you, Eus. I was wondering why it was plural.

The "chamberlains", at. 3 m 30 s in tha animation, refer to Austen Chamberlain, one of the leader of the britisch conservative pary and foreign minister, architect of the Locarno treaty, for which he got the nobel peace-price in 1926, that created peace between France & German, co-signed by Italy and Belgium garanteeing Germany's western border, making it enter the predecessor of the UN, and binding the European nation to settle their conflicts by negociations not with war. He also Brought England in the Kellog-Briand treaty. His brother Neville, from 1937 till 1940 was the prime minister of Brittain also trying to keep european peace by giving sudetenland to Hitler in the Munich treaty from 1938. At the time of the animation, both brothers were leading members of the conservativer party, but Neville was internationally not yet in the picture. Both were trying to keep peace in Western Europe, not so much in the third world. That'ds wat the animation refers too. Also how sudetenland was givens away to Hitler, was not very considerate toward Czechoslovakia to whom it belonged.

I actually like this one more than the original - the songs are equally as memorable (and they seem to run all the way through the film without break, more so than in the original), and a lot of other things are done better. The sleuth is a fun new addition, I like that the backgrounds are no longer in crayon but more similar in style to how the characters are drawn, and the story, while still minimal, is stronger (with no more dubious tricks by the "heroes" like dressing up as bandits to trick the king). I guess it's because Livanov was director - I think he cared more about polish than Kovalevskaya did. Shame it was his last director's credit in animation, but I suppose he went on to bigger things.