A lot of people have commented on the washbasin in this one looking rather creepy, and I agree! I'm glad that this film has been found finally, as it's an important part of Soviet animation history - it's the first Soviet puppet film, as far as I know. Benderskaya had to "reinvent" the technique, as it had been lost when Ladislas Starevich fled Russia with the other White emigres almost a decade prior. Her technique is cruder than his in many ways, although the addition of music (thank you, whoever at RuTracker added it) does make the film a lot more watchable than it was when I first tried to watch it the original, music-free version that was uploaded.

For the translation, I wanted to use the existing English translation of the story, but the intertitles were just too different, so I had to translate the entire thing anew. I tried to do it in the same spirit that I think it would have been done at the time - not as a one-for-one translation, but to give the same effect as the original. Besides, I translated mainly from the Russian text, which takes a similar approach from the Czech. And possibly the Czech intertitles did the same thing for the original Russian intertitles, which are lost. So trying to translate it with slavish accuracy didn't seem to make very much sense here, anyway. Still, I tried to keep within the ballpark.