I think this movie is exceptionally well-structured and it's one of my favourite Russian animated features. Despite the rather bland short live-action intro at the beginning. It also has interesting characters - even the "villains" are often shown to have redeeming features. It is told from the perspective of an old-school Indo-European culture, and assumes social mores that to modern sensibilities seem really alien.

In some places, the English title is given as "The Magic Reed-Pipe". However, there is clearly no reed on the instrument. It seems to be a fipple flute. I considered "The Magic Flute" but I think the confusion with the famous work by Mozart would be too much.

I did some work to fix the sound synchronization issues (see notes in the English subtitles description).

I hope we get a proper release of this film one day, without with strange luma ghosting artifacts in the video, and with well-synced, stereo audio (it was released with only one working audio channel on DVD).