Remember the charming cat that sneezed in the intro of the Soviet cartoon? We remember, and found it - along with a bunch of other hand-drawn fiction. As a child, she frightened and discouraged, because she raised serious, adult topics. It's time to revisit old cartoons to find out what kind of future they dreamed of in that country.
1977: "Polygon"
Animator Anatoly Petrov had a hand in many famous Soviet cartoons, from The Bremen Town Musicians to Boniface's Vacation. His independent work was much more interesting: he painted realistic three-dimensional graphics. The most famous example of Petrov's style was the short cartoon "Polygon" based on an anti-war story by science fiction writer Sever Gansovsky.
The plot is simple: a nameless inventor came up with an invulnerable tank that reads the mind of the enemy. Field tests of the perfect weapon are taking place on a tropical island - apparently, this is a reference to the Bikini and Eniwetok atolls. The military commission includes the general under whose command the hero's son died. The tank destroys the military, and then its avenged creator.
To create the effect of volume, the characters were drawn on two layers of celluloid, and one was filmed out of focus. In tense moments, a blurry image becomes sharp. The camera moves all the time, freezing only briefly. There is no blood in the frame, and the only musical accompaniment consists of the famous song "Tanha Shodam" by Ahmad Zahir. All this together conveys feelings of anxiety, fear and longing - the feelings of the era when the "Doomsday Clock" showed 9 minutes to midnight. By the way, in 2018 the arrow was moved to 23:58, so the prediction came true?
1978: "Contact"
In 1968, Canadian animator George Dunning filmed the famous Yellow Submarine. The cartoon came to the Soviet Union only in the 80s on pirated cassettes. However, back in 1978, director and artist Vladimir Tarasov shot his own bright musical phantasmagoria. Short, but John Lennon is definitely guessed in the main character. This is the merit of the artist Nikolai Koshkin, who "quoted" a musical Western cartoon.
Soviet "Lennon" - an artist who got out into the open air. In nature, he meets an alien, also an artist in his own way. A formless being reincarnates in the objects seen. At first, the person is frightened, but then he teaches the guest to whistle the melody "Speak Softly Love" from The Godfather. Unlike its distant cousins from Annihilation, the alien befriends a human and walks off into the sunset with them.
Life hack: turn off the original soundtrack of "Contact" and turn on Lucy in the sky with diamonds. You'll notice that the cartoon's video sequence matches the music almost perfectly.
1980: "Return"
"Return" is another Tarasov cartoon. He describes events that are everyday by the standards of science fiction: the Valdai T-614 space cargo ship fell into a meteor shower and was damaged, due to which it can only be landed on Earth in manual mode. The pilot is advised to get enough sleep before landing. He falls into a deep sleep, attempts to wake him fail. However, when the ship's course passes over his home in the village, the astronaut somehow senses this, wakes up and lands the ship.
It is not clear whether the hero's unconsciousness threatened to be a catastrophe. The music (Gustav Mahler's 5th symphony) eloquently indicates that the situation is unsettling. The authors were advised by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, so the film accurately reflects the technical side of the flights. At the same time, realism and everyday life is broken by flashy references to Alien, which came out just a year earlier. The space truck from the inside resembles a Gigerian alien ship, and the pilot himself bears little resemblance to a person. The short cartoon is just as scary as the classic facehugging scene.
1981: Space Aliens
The famous science fiction writers, the Strugatsky brothers, wrote several scripts for cartoons, but Soviet censorship cut them all down. All but one, which Arkady Strugatsky wrote with his friend, writer and translator Marian Tkachev. It was the script for the first episode of Space Aliens.
The plots are promising: an alien ship descends to Earth, the aliens send out black robotic probes. A group of scientists is trying to figure out what the space guests want. Then it turns out that they want to share technology. "Arrival" booked?
Drawn in an avant-garde constructivist style, this cartoon is just over fifteen minutes long. It seems to be much longer, because the pace of events on the screen is uneven and slow. The lethargic calmness with which the actors deliver unnecessarily long sentences underscores this hallmark of The Aliens.
"Experimental" philosophical parables were one of the favorite genres of Soviet animators. Nevertheless, "Aliens" crosses the line between "it's deep" and "it's boring." Strugatsky seems to have understood this himself, so the second series was filmed without him. In it, the aliens experience the moral stamina of people. People stand the test and everything seems to end well. And it's good that it ends.
1984: "There will be gentle rain"
In 1950, American writer Ray Bradbury wrote one of the most famous post-apocalyptic stories in the history of the genre. "There Will Be Gentle Rain" tells how the robotic "smart house" continues to work after the explosion of the atomic bomb. After 34 years, Uzbekfilm shot a short, emotional cartoon based on the story.
Bradbury's text is transmitted with only some creative liberties. For example, in the story after the catastrophe, some time passed - days or a month. In the cartoon, the robot, which does not understand what happened, shakes out the ashes of the owners, incinerated the day before, from their beds. Then a bird flies into the house, the robot chases after it and accidentally destroys the house.
This film adaptation won prizes at three international festivals and one all-Union. The director and screenwriter of the cartoon was the actor and director Nazim Tulyakhodzhaev from Tashkent. By the way, his work with Bradbury's material did not end there: three years later he made a film based on the story "Veld". Of the two film adaptations, the audience remembered exactly “There Will Be Gentle Rain”, because the horror before the global war is difficult to interrupt or dispel.
1985: "Contract"
Soviet animators loved to film the works of foreign science fiction writers. As a result, bright projects appeared, real fruits of love. Such as the cartoon "Contract" based on the short story of the same name by Robert Silverberg. The bright, avant-garde style, so beloved by director Tarasov, is reminiscent of pop art. Musical accompaniment - excerpts from the jazz composition I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby performed by Ella Fitzgerald.
Both the original and the cartoon begin in the same way: a colonist fights off monsters on a desert planet. He comes to the aid of a robot salesman, who, it turns out, released these monsters in order to force a person to buy his goods. The colonist contacts the company that sent him to the planet and finds out that, under the terms of the contract, he cannot trade with the robot. In addition, for sending everyday things like razors, he will be torn off three skins, since they are obliged to supply him only with the necessary for life.
The plot of the original and the film adaptation then diverge. In the story, the robot threatens to shoot the colonist. The colonist wittily gets out of the situation by demanding money from the company to save his life, and after the refusal he breaks the contract and declares the planet his rightful pioneer. Even the ironic endorsement of capitalist practices was taboo for the Union. Therefore, in the cartoon, the companies of the colonist and the robot unleash a war. A robot sacrifices itself to keep a human warm in an unexpected snowfall. Despite the obvious ideological message, the cartoon leaves a good impression.
1985–1995: Fantadrome
The children's animated series Fantadroms looks like it was drawn by Western animators. In fact, the first three episodes were released by Telefilm-Riga, and then another ten were released by the Latvian studio Dauka.
The protagonist of Fantadrome is Indrix XIII, a robot cat that can change shape. It is he who sneezes at the beginning and at the end of each episode. Together with his friends, the space cat saves aliens and people from unpleasant situations like fires, misunderstandings or a sudden lack of salt in breakfast. Plots of "Phantadrome" are revealed without words, only with images, music and sounds, as in Disney's "Fantasy".
The first three "Soviet" series look serious: they focus on spaceships and the metropolis where Indrix lives. The new ten episodes are aimed at children, so the focus has shifted to what is called slapstick comedy. If the studios had more resources and opportunities, it's easy to imagine that Fantadroms could become a kind of space "Tom and Jerry". Unfortunately, the potential of the series remained unfulfilled.
1986: "Battle"
Another film adaptation of Western fiction, this time a story by Stephen King. An ex-military-turned-killer kills the director of a toy factory. After completing the order, he receives a package with toy soldiers produced at the victim's factory. Soldiers somehow come to life and attack the killer. The fight ends in victory for the toys, as the set contains a miniature thermonuclear charge.
The cartoon is made in the technique of total animation. This means that as the characters move and the backgrounds change to convey the movement of the camera. The costly and time-consuming method is rarely used in hand-drawn animation, but aptly. "Battle" total animation gave incredible dynamism. The short cartoon looks no worse than Die Hard, which was released two years later.
An attentive viewer will find in the first minute of the cartoon a reference to the scene of driving along Tokyo interchanges in Tarkovsky's Solaris. A futuristic landscape with an endless maze of roads emphasizes that everything happens in the near, gloomy future.
1988: "Pass"
Talking about the fantastic Soviet animation, one cannot fail to mention the cult "Pass". The cartoon was shot based on the first chapter of the science fiction writer Kir Bulychev's story "The Village", and the author himself wrote the script.
"The Village" tells about the fate of a space expedition whose ship crash-landed on an unknown planet. The surviving people had to flee the ship, fleeing the radiation from the damaged engine. People founded the village, learned to hunt with a bow and arrow, raised children, and over and over again made attempts to return through the pass to the ship. In the cartoon, a group of three teenagers and an adult go to the ship. The adult dies, and the children, better adapted to the dangerous world, reach their destination.
"The Pass" stands out even against the background of other avant-garde science fiction cartoons of the time. The graphics for the film were drawn by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, known for controversial historical theories. To show the terrible alien world, he used his illustrations for The Master and Margarita. The music was written by Alexander Gradsky, including a song based on verses by the poet Sasha Cherny.
The director of "Pass" was Vladimir Tarasov, who has already been mentioned several times in this selection. Tarasov read "The Village" in the journal "Knowledge is Power" and was imbued with the question of what human society really represents. The result is a scary and entertaining cartoon with an open ending.
1989: "There may be tigers here"
Long before James Cameron made his Avatar, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story on the same subject. A human ship arrives on an uninhabited planet to mine for minerals. A beautiful alien world has a mind and hospitably welcomes earthlings. When a representative of the expedition's sponsoring company tries to start drilling, the planet sends a tiger on him. The expedition departs, leaving one young cosmonaut behind.
Soviet animators managed to transfer Bradbury's philosophical history to the screen almost without discrepancies. In the cartoon, the evil leader of the expedition manages to activate the bomb before his death. Earthlings sacrifice themselves to save the planet: they load a bomb onto a ship and fly away. Criticism of predatory capitalism existed in the original text as well, so a dramatic twist is added to add action to the plot. Unlike The Contract, this cartoon did not have opposite meanings.
1991-1992: The Vampires of Geona
Soviet animation did not die immediately with the collapse of the Union. In the 90s, several clearly “Soviet” science fiction cartoons managed to come out.
In 1991 and 1992 director Gennady Tishchenko presented the cartoons "Vampires of Geona" and "Masters of Geona". He wrote the script himself from his own story. The plot is as follows: Inspector of the Cosmoecological Commission (CEC) Yanin goes to the planet Geona. There, local pterodactyls ("vampires") bite the colonists and interfere with the interstellar concern to develop mineral deposits. It turns out that the planet is inhabited, local intelligent beings live underwater in symbiosis with vampires and other fauna. The concern leaves the planet because its activities harm the environment.
The most conspicuous feature of cartoons: two American characters copied from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The giant cartoon "Arnie" is somewhat akin to hypertrophied comic book superheroes from the 90s. Next to him, the bearded Russian Yanin looks like a child. Against the backdrop of an unexpected Hollywood "cranberry", the main philosophical message of the film is somewhat lost.
The cartoons were supposed to become a whole series called "Star World". At the end of the second episode, Yanin optimistically declares that people will still return to Geona, but his words were not destined to come true.
1994–1995: AMBA
A couple of years after Geona, Tishchenko made a second attempt to continue the space saga. Two episodes of the AMBA cartoon show how a scientist developed a way to grow cities from biomass. One such settlement, "AMBA" (Automorphic Bioarchitectural Ensemble), was grown in the Martian desert, and another was planted on a distant planet. Communication with the project was interrupted, and inspector Yanin, already familiar to us, was sent there with an unnamed partner.
The film's visual style became significantly more "Western". However, the content remained true to the former course towards solid Soviet science fiction. Tishchenko is a fan of science fiction writer Ivan Efremov. In two short cartoons, the director tried to fit the idea that the future of technological civilization will come to an end (hence the title).
Serious problems arose with the exposition, this is a typical case when what is happening is told, not shown. There are enough battles and heroism on the screen, but the pace of events is “torn”: first, alien tentacles attack the heroes, then they patiently listen to the story about where these tentacles came from.
Perhaps in the third part of the "Star World" it would be possible to get rid of the shortcomings of the previous ones. Unfortunately, the Soviet tradition has finally disappeared in the new millennium, so now all these cartoons are history.
Was your favorite sci-fi cartoon missing from the selection? Tell us about it in the comments.
Source: habr.com