Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/24/little-timos-christmas-tree.html
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That’s what happens when you cast your comrades that accidentally break the red globe of the workers paradise out into the cold, ruled by the eyeglass wearing capitalist scarecrows and empty headed kulak snowmen! You then have to rely on the counter-revolutionary forces to return your comrades back to the fold under the direction of Old Man Frost and the People’s Commissariat of Misfit Toys.
Sorry. Even as an avowed Marxist, I couldn’t resist being silly for a bit.
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Oh, surely it is about a New Year tree, not a decadent Western Christmas Tree!
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Reminds me of seeing the Russian made The Snow Queen when I was a kid.
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Nah, that was clearly Trotsky.
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Cold War humor aside, I really appreciate some of the high-quality gems when SMA was a cool thing (and sometimes still is). This is one I’d never seen before.
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Rankinsky/Bassov productions?
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Well said. Soviet animation was amazingly cool, I wish we could see more of it.
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I watched The Nightingale the other day, and the poorer quality of the production values (lighting, artistry, smoothness of animation) really make me wonder how much of the differences could be attributed to talent or simply budget?
I mean, compare US productions like Santa Claus is Coming to Town, to say, the one about Smokey the Bear, and the difference in quality is stark (between US productions), also.
Is “Timo” the Soviet version of “Timmy” ? Cartman wants to know.
Timotei – Romanian
Timofei, Timofey – Russian
Timotej – Slovak
Timotej, Tim – Slovene
All borrowed from Finnish, German, Dutch roots of Timothy, I believe.
Fun! We have a Russian-owned bar down the street, so get to watch a stream of old Russian classics on a regular basis - slapstick, folktale adaptations, etc. Of course , the subtitles are often still in Russian, so the pics are still rather incomprehensible, outside of context…
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From: The Humpbacked Horse 1947, see below. Gif from Tumbler
The central branch library that we used to use showed movies in its own theater. The films were sometimes modern, for the times, and in those cases they were mostly from Canada, but were sometimes from around the world, via Canada.
Oddly, many of the films were from Russia and the U.S.S.R., and the library had an extensive collection of movies going back to the start of the cold war. I remember the best of them were in fairly frequent rotation.
If you want to have a good conversation with anybody from the former U.S.S.R. states or Russia, I highly recommend watching the animated movies made by their art institutes and film studios. Anybody under 50 from those countries will remember the films fondly, and they know the folk stories and back stories concerning the films with greater depth than most Wikipedia articles.
Once at a party I mentioned this story about a magical horse or donkey, and boiling oil. I was dying to remember the name of the film but Google kept sending me to biblical story. People from Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia all shouted The Humpbacked Horse 1947/The Magical Pony 1977 (English translation)- well in Russian. Even the Serbian and Croatian talked amibley together about the film, and the host reminded them how old they were when hostilities broke loose. The film brough everybody together and those who grew up on the films from this era talked about their favorites.
Below, the Magic Pony 1947/1977 English Dub
Spoiler- the original fairytale is much more grim and ends with the king… well watch the film or hop to 1hr 10min and guess what happens in the original fairytale. It has a lot of problems, as do most fairy tales, but is worth the watch.
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A bit old yet I like the animation and art.
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