Some of the same sense of timing and movement as in Tatarskiy's earlier films, but here the effect is more horrifying rather than funny. Tatarskiy had never done a film like this before, though some of the other directors at Pilot had. Notably, his once close collaborator Igor Kovalyov, back in 1989. The surreal portrayal of the desires of the living affecting the inanimate, in particular, is very much something that Kovalyov liked to do, while some of the sense of environmental "wrongness" remind me of Svislotskiy's Hypnerotomachia.

This actually seems like the sort of film that many other directors (such as Robert Saakyants) started making starting around the late 1980s (a decade earlier among the Estonians), so Tatarskiy was rather late to it. He was initially very optimistic about the changes in the country, so perhaps it took a decade longer to hit him? This was shortly after the 1998 economic collapse, and after several calamities befell his unfinished feature film project, so he must have been feeling pretty down.

But it is very strange that this was to be his final solo film. His next ones were all co-directed with Telegin and don't really feel like Tatarskiy to me, with "Interpretation of Dreams" being a partial exception.

Perhaps it was also his last that was traditionally-animated (I'm not sure about "The Red Gate of Rashomon").