This film is the third or the fourth by the Ukrainfilm studio, and a great improvement over their earlier works. I find it to be the first one of their films that is really worth watching, and not just as a historical curio. The animation is surprisingly detailed and quite entertaining. The propaganda is also kept to a minimum - sure, the message is basically "stay in your lane", and you might argue that it's aimed at leading cultural figures, to encourage them to stay in the USSR where "conditions are good" and not try to flee to the capitalist West where they would "get eaten alive". But there is no overt propaganda, and it's a lesson you could legitimately put into a children's book, anyway. It's a shame that the film was thought lost for so long, and that the colour version didn't survive. It shows Ippolit Lazarchuk as a very talented director whose career was cut off right at the height of his skill (thankfully, he was able to again begin making animation in the 1960s, and those are quite good as well).

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of some analogue in American (or other) animation of the scene with the very tall waves? There's another similar scene in the Soyuzmultfilm cartoon "The Returned Sun", also made in 1936, at 1:45. If I were to guess, were they both inspired by some scene in a Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoon that made its way over there?