An interesting historical artifact, surprisingly well preserved (aside from the unfortunate lack of sound... I wonder if any documents survive that say what it was going to be like?). I don't, at the moment, know the reasons for why it was abandoned so close to completion. Maybe simply because socialist realism was in vogue then, and there are no penguins in the Arctic? Or maybe there was a strict deadline and they were unable to finish in time. Whatever the reason, the studio made no animated films after that year. No animation would be made in Ukraine again until 1959.

The "plot" doesn't seem to have much to it, but I'll bet the musical numbers would have done a lot to liven it up. To me, the idea of making a cartoon about a daring scientific expedition feels unusual and fresh, despite how silly the plot is.

The animation doesn't seem as nice as in The Conceited Chick (1936) by the same studio. For the human characters (at least their bodies), they clearly used rotoscoping. I'd say the overall animation quality might be somewhat better than what Georgia Film was doing at the time, a little worse than Soyuzmultfilm's average in that year, and significantly worse than the only animated film from Lenfilm, Jabzha (a gem that deserved to be distributed wider than it was).

For comparison, here are all the films from 1938 currently on the site.

I learned something relevant today. Boris Dyozhkin and Gennadiy Filippov created a cartoon with a very similar plot in 1937 at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow (for Dyozhkin, the studio's star animator, it was the first time he directed): Привет героям! (Greetings to the Heroes!). Dyozhkin had heard about the success of the Arctic expedition, and burned with the desire to commemorate it. He called on Filippov, who found a composer, and they locked themselves in their room with bread and water and finished animating the movie in just 7 days! (as related by Dyozhkin's wife in her interview with Sergey Kapkov, which I read in his 2025 book "The Legends of Soyuzmultfilm Studio", p. 55) It was not in the studio plan, but the management had no choice but to accept the film, which was well liked by viewers. However, it apparently has not survived at all, not even a still image from it!

So, I was thinking: this Ukrainian cartoon from Odessa was likely inspired by the earlier one made in Moscow. Maybe that could even be one of the reasons it wasn't allowed to be finished? Did some higher-up say "we already have something similar"?