The current war has actually done one good thing : It has awakened the Ukrainian people. Now they could speak their own voice about cultural identity, instead of having to hide under the shadow of the Soviet Union.

>>9
Good news! Hope we get to see it.
The links say that they made 3 versions - Old Russian (the original language it was written in), Russian and Ukrainian. I hope the Old Russian one shows up too, at some point.

P.S. To support the point I made in my previous long post, "Old Russian" is more commonly called "Old East Slavic" in English these days, but in that Ukrainian article the term used for that ancestor language (of which a close relative is still spoken in the church) is precisely "Old Russian". On the other hand, the term for the modern Russian language in that article is "Rosiysky", which comes from the word that refers specifically to the Russian state, rather than the Russian people. A bit like how some British folks call the language spoken in America "American" - though that's usually said in jest rather than in seriousness.

Знайдено український варіант анімаційного фільму «Сказання про Ігорів похід» 1972 року
Знайдено українську версію анімаційної стрічки за мотивами «Слова о полку Ігоревім»

A charming film, and I think one of Viken's best. I love the late 1980s/early 1990s trend in certain circles of the Soviet & post-Soviet animation world to have the camera be constantly moving, and have as much of the image be redrawn frame-by-frame as possible. It would be interesting to track the influence of this style - when and where it first started getting popular. I can't remember where I read it, but one film critic considered it one of the key trends in Perestroika/early 1990s Russian and Ukrainian animation, and it was a deliberate artistic choice. Perhaps it began at Kievnauchfilm, where the popular films of David Cherkasskiy mixed cutout animation with short dynamic interludes of cel animation in which the perspectives were exaggerated and the camera was always moving. And maybe later, some directors liked what they saw so much that they made it a centrepiece of their style.

Other examples include The Box of Pencil Crayons (1985) by Vladlen Barbe, Looking-Rhymes (1988) by Roze Stiebra, 9 1/2 Minutes (1993) by Sergey Kushnerov, the whole filmography of Yelena Gavrilko, many of the solo films of Rozaliya Zelma (maybe not so much in the camera work, but certainly in being unafraid to use coloured pencils), many of the early films of Pilot Studio and Tatarskiy (particularly an infamous epic scene in his unfinished feature film, "Train Arrival"). And I'm sure I'm still missing a ton of examples.

Faint echoes made their way into the productions by American studio Klasky Csupo. Perhaps a contemporary example in the West were the films of American Bill Plympton, certain scenes in films by Richard Williams, or British director Joanna Quinn (e.g. her excellent Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (2006)).

It was kind of like an echo and further development of the ideas of early 1930s American animation, especially Fleischer Studios and Disney (Disney insisted that all of the characters on screen had to constantly be moving, although the camera still usually stayed in one place). The "limited animation" movement of the 1950s/1960s was a reaction against the Disney style, and it had fans in the USSR as well. But by the 1980s/1990s, the pendulum in the USSR had well and truly swung back quite strongly.

As far as I can tell, this style died away with the advent of computer animation, replaced more and more with digital cutouts that were simpler and cheaper to move around (though at the cost of looking lifeless).

P.S. Apologies for the lack of site updates lately. I'm prioritizing working on the site infrastructure.

This cartoon is almost like the 4th-part or new version of the Masha series (1977‒1979) about poetics. The image of the cucumber horse is quite similar to the pillow (1st p.) and the jam bottle (3rd p.).

This film reminds me of the style of Vietnamese animation before 1990. They often have simple content with drawings that evoke the lives of farmers. However in the case of this film, I think the Kyiv artists were actually trained in Moskva not so long before that they were not yet able to create their own character like in the Brezhnev period.

In between "Nu pogodi" 8 & 9, Kotyonochkin made this rather less well-known cartoon featuring a rather similar hare and a similar rock-loving hooligan (but a fox this time, not a wolf). It is probably about as good... I guess? But just with less iconic characters. Although many of their mannerisms are the same. I was amused by the parody of a rock song in the middle, with the fox singing complete nonsense English and his girlfriend being absolutely won over by the display.

A pretty epic "music video", this one. The songs are excellently performed (by the Red Army Choir, if I'm not mistaken), and they are dynamically and movingly accompanied by the animation. There's not much of a plot, but it's not aiming at that. Inessa Kovalevskaya never really cared much for the plot in her films, I think - she always put the music and mood above everything. Many of the songs in her films became very famous, though the films themselves aren't always as well remembered (nor were they initially much liked by professional critics, at least before it became obvious just how popular they were).

There are 5 songs included here, though only 4 are actually sung. If you follow all the rabbit holes in learning about them (see the links helpfully included above), you can learn quite a lot about the Russian Civil War. Or just enjoy the wonderful music and pictures.

This was released on DVD a while back on the "Animated Soviet Propaganda" DVD set. The first two songs were fairly well-translated in that release (though they didn't realize that a few of the lines were different compared to the "usual" modern versions of these songs), but the last two (especially the final one) deviated quite a bit more from the actual words. So the translations for those have been changed quite a bit here.

It was purely by chance that I found this film among the restored works, only a pity that most of them are still out of color. In any case, Russian cinema has not disappointed me yet.

Ivan Krylov's story brings back bitter memories to me about two of my old friends. Their problems have only been going on for the past year.

A man named Phú (meaning "rich" in Vietnamese). Last year I was in so much trouble and despair that I invited him out to the iced tea stall and asked for his help. I wanted him to go with me to the HanoiTV to collaborate on translating Russian films, of which I have a lot of translations. However, he refused in a voice and attitude almost like a prince. Even though he was fired from the city portal, he still has a press card and that could help me a little with connecting issues. Imagine that he just woke up that afternoon after playing games, and his clothes and hair were in terrible shape. My other friend and me invited him with all the courtesy of educated people, but he showed us no respect, and even asked us to pay for him before leaving early. It must also be said that at that time he bragged that he had many relationships, but the reality was that he was about to be fired again and had to live off the meager salary of his young wife. About a year later, on the hottest day of summer, he suddenly called me in a superior tone. At that time I was sleeping after staying up all night to work, so I was very tired and irritable. He asked me out to an iced tea stall in a very dirty place. I refused immediately, certainly. Suddenly he asked me to pay him back the debt from when we were students. The amount of money was really not much compared to my ability, however I felt indignant about the way he treated me before. I responded that he should pay me a few hundred US dollars to make up for the meals I had bought him, and then I can pay him back. He couldn't argue with me, so he cursed : "My life met another dog". I immediately replied : "Alright, I am a dog, but my name is preserved forever in the national library ; while death is your end, even your descendants do not want to remember you". That same day, I told another friend : "If he behaved more modestly, even though I had nothing at the moment, I would still try to borrow money from somewhere to help him ; however, with his behavior like that, even if I had a mountain of gold, I still wouldn't give it to him".

"Other friend" named Định (meaning "decide" in Vietnamese). He looks wiser and more elegant than the above mentioned friend. He is a lawyer and has a pretty comfortable life from his job and the support of his family. However, since he is a lawyer, he cannot go too far in that field. He can only be interested in some issues in mainland China and Japan, and is very fond of cars ; other than that, he knows nothing about world politics and cultural issues. It could even be said that he was always prejudiced whenever I mentioned the "West", a term still understood to mean Europe and the US. That's why we're quite different from each other, even though we studied literature together. I always give him moral advice to help him balance between reality and work. For example : One day he was extremely sad because he could not help a client recover a large sum of money (because the defendant had bribed the court) ; I advised him to surprise the client by taking that person out to eat something, and thus help that one get away from despair and start the life over. However, he did not follow and even declared that : I am nothing for him to listen to (although it was good advice). Whenever I sit next to him, I am always struck by the shortsightedness, arrogance and selfishness of an individual who received too much grace but wasted opportunities. Oh yeah, that's why i feel bitter ! Fate is so ironic, like the name of a Soviet drama, when those who know too much receive contempt, while those who know too little always waste everything.

Film based on the same name of an Ukrainian-language children's book by Pavlo Glazovyy, Fedir Makivchuk, Heorhiy Karlov.