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.