Animatsiya in English

Fresh on the heels of fixing Dailymotion support last month by learning their new API, while the process was still fresh in my memory, this week I decided to add VK video support to Animatsiya.net. This means that custom subtitles can be placed over the top of any VK video (here's a recently-updated example). Many animated films are on VK.com even if they aren't anywhere else, so this should be very useful.

For example, a few weeks ago, one of the YouTube channels that upload old content from Soviet television (including animated films from Ekran studio, the USSR's second-biggest) decided to disallow embedding their videos in other sites such as Animatsiya. So dozens of Ekran animations suddenly stopped working.

At the same time, the other official "Soviet Television archive" YouTube channels (they maintain a number of them, for different "types" of content) continued to allow them, and kept uploading new films, including many of the ones that had just become inaccessible. Truly a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing.

I tried to replace all the broken links. However, not all of them have been re-uploaded to YouTube yet, while most of them have been on VK for a long time (sometimes for over a decade), so adding VK support was really important.

I didn't actually think it was possible at first, but it turns out they have a well-documented API for their video widget. The only issue was getting video thumbnails - I couldn't figure out a way to get them without using the video.get request, which required a user access token and access rights. In the end, I decided to use PHP's file_get_contents to scrape the thumbnail from the embed link of a VK video. Oddly, that seems to work faster than the official API methods I'm using to get the thumbnails from Dailymotion and Vimeo.

I'll probably try to add support for more video sites later. I made a spreadsheet comparing the various APIs/SDKs of the video sites out there, to see which ones have the features I'd need to add support. At minimum, I need a way to tell what time it is in the video that's being watched, so that the correct subtitle shows up at the correct time.

The following sites are currently supported:
YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, VK

The following additional sites should be possible:
Facebook (if I'm allowed to create an app ID), Internet Archive, Rumble, PeerTube, RuTube, Odysee

Of those, I've seen Russian/Soviet animation actually being uploaded to Facebook (officially, believe it or not!), Internet Archive, Odysee and PeerTube (though federated PeerTube sites seem to be ephemeral and tend to be slow). Perhaps RuTube as well, although the only thing I found there was modern-Soyuzmultfilm's official channel with their new animated series, and the prolific content is (in my opinion) a discouraging dump of mediocrity and bad taste (I'm sure this is not what Yuriy Norshteyn was hoping for after his frequent calls over the decades to resurrect Soyuzmultfilm, that's all I'll say). Rumble seems to be user-friendly, but mainly focused on politically-controversial American content, without anyone uploading Russian/Soviet animation. Still, it would only take one channel (though the Russian government's banning of Rumble last month makes this less likely...).

Also, I have this idea that it may be possible to add external subtitle support for ANY video site that allows embedding (such as OK or bilibili or mover.uz) if I can get the user to click a "start subtitles" button at a time of their choosing. It would be the user's job to click "Start subtitles" at, say, 0:05 in the film. Not ideal, but probably not too awful, either!

The major issue with adding support for more sites is getting my head around the design. Some of the embedded videos from certain sites send out events that must be listened to (e.g. they send out "current time in video" every 1/4 second), while others will return the current time in the video if they are polled (I'd need to send a request to them asking what the current time is every 1/4 second, and wait for the reply). I want to write something that combines both to reduce repetition, but these are opposite approaches.

Unfortunately, working on the programming side has meant that the addition of new films has suffered. There's always a trade-off. :p

The last time the code of Animatsiya.net was updated was all the way back in mid-September! Since then, 164 films have been added to the site (for a total of 1460), and 702 subtitles (with 137 films subtitled in English for the first time).

In April, I finally found an Armenian-speaking translator to collaborate with. It turns out that Robert Saakyants (Sahakyants) is not the only Armenian animation director of note. Who knew? My favourite newly-subtitled film so far is probably "The Magic Lavash", directed by Stepan Andranikyan, who was Sergei Parajanov's art director: I've been told that it is a beloved classic in Armenia, but little-known outside its borders (even within the Soviet Union; it seems that a Russian-language version was never made). The studio has done a wonderful restoration of it recently. More new Armenfilm translations will be coming soon...



As for other languages: Cynir has continued adding subtitles in Vietnamese, Pastella and Argopoiss in Estonian, zaza added a few in French and showed me where to find more. M. Kazandjiev has helped maintain the Bulgarian site translation, picking up the baton from Zhukorop.

What's new:

Dailymotion videos work again, after not working for a week or two because Dailymotion had finally turned off their old API in favour of the new 2021 API. A bit of hackery behind the scenes was required to get the embedded videos NOT to autoload automatically, which is the super-annoying default behaviour of the new Dailymotion player. Basically, a preview image appears that LOOKS like the player, and the actual player loads only after you press "play" the first time.

There's now a search function for your mailbox (users can now search the content of their messages to find a specific one).

The "Translators" table formerly just listed the languages of a translator's subtitles alphabetically, so it wasn't possible to tell what language a translator "specialized" in. Now the table calculates what % of subtitles are in each language, and lists the most common languages first. There's also now a column to show the "translated from" languages as well.

A few "accessibility" features have been added (with more to come) - added label to checkmark on front page, added "alt" attributes to images.

Bugs fixed:

- The "subtitle visibility" setting for videolinks in the "Add Film" page was sometimes not being updated correctly
- If one clicked on the "Edit subtitle" button to edit an existing subtitle, the auto-generated name for the subtitle was wrong
- In "Add Translator", the "Remove" button for additional names didn't work
- In "Site Translation", if the user-associated translation file was older than the most recent "live" translation update, it wouldn't get updated. This didn't make much sense, as it might mean that if somebody had started translating in one language, and the site was updated afterwards, they wouldn't see any of the updates.

Last but not least:
Eus347 has a Youtube channel again and is adding new translations to the site as well, helped by Lemicnor. I've fallen a bit behind on adding his subtitles because I've been working on technical issues instead, but I'll get around to it. :)

This is Part 2 of an overview of the Russian/Soviet holiday-themed animated films that are currently available to be watched with English subtitles (or wordless) on Animatsiya.net, listed from earliest to latest. Each film will have a description, as well as a summary of what's good about it (why you may enjoy watching it), and what's bad about it (why you may not want to watch it).

Part 1 was written back in December 2021, and 17 new winter holiday-themed films have appeared on the site since then, often newly translated, 16 of which are in the picture below:



As before, each film below is rated; here's what the ratings mean:
**** - I loved it
*** - I liked it
** - I thought it was ok
* - I didn't like it
(no stars) - haven't watched it yet (or not recently)

The ratings are based on my own feelings, and other people may feel differently. Also, a lot of the ** ones do have things that I like about them.
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One more thing - some very sad news. I've been informed by someone from his family that Жукороп (Zhukorop), who translated the site to Bulgarian, as well as contributed a fair number of subtitles to animatsiya.net (both Bulgarian and English), has passed away. His last edit to the site was November 30, and his most recent major contribution was the initial English translation of The Adventures of Captain Wrongel (1976-1979). He was a lovely person to interact with, and he also seems to have been a pretty good artist and ROM hacker. I'm very sad that I did not take the opportunity to get to know him better while I had the chance.

Since the last update in March, 244 films have been added to Animatsiya.net, 168 of them with with new English subtitles and the remaining ones needing no translation.



I've also been busy on the coding side. Some notable recent changes are:

Searching films from the main page works again.

Actually, it never stopped working if you typed into the text box in the films page or any other place films are listed, e.g. a studio, a decade, etc., but now it works from the main page again (although it's kinda slow, since it does that by opening the main "films" page and searching that. I'll try to improve that at some point)

Subtitle comparison is now much more useful

So, if you click on any subtitle, you can see the history of changes that have been made to it. Previously, they were compared as just two strings of text, but now they're compared as two .srt subtitle files, line by line, and the site looks at which lines/timings have been changed and which haven't. This leads to much more useful results, as you can see in this comparison:

Before:

After:

It often got confused after the very first difference in the text (such as the subtitle timing being different), and would mark everything after that as being changed. But now, you can see which timings or texts were actually changed:



Work-in-progress Vietnamese site

Cynir, who's contributed well over 100 subtitles to the site, has also begun to translate it through the Site Translation and Add Multiple pages (described in the March update). Currently, it's at 412/497 translated, and 59% of the text overall. It's already live at animatsiya.net/vi, though not yet linked on the main page. What still remains to be done is the translation of a few remaining short texts, some of the longer texts, more of the titles of the wordless films, and perhaps a few bugs caused by the structure of the English and Vietnamese languages being so very different... (seriously, the Google Translate between them is one of the worst I've seen!)



Bulgarian site improvements

Zhukorop/Жукороп has continued to improve the Bulgarian version of the site. Now at 480/497 of text lines, 81% of text, and almost ALL of the 545 film titles accessible to Bulgarian-speakers.



Other changes

You can now click on individual years again to see all films from that year (e.g. see all films from 1948, an especially good year).

The list of films now displays properly again, when adding or editing film series.

Fixed broken SEO, so site pages display in Google search results again (this might be kind of a big deal. There are still things I need to do better here, though, which is on the TODO list)

Fixed a bug in which a film page would show incorrect history if more than one subtitle in a row was added through the "Add Subtitles" page (actually, this was by far the most difficult job and required a big refactoring of the website's code)

Fixed a bug in which the list of studios page would sometimes show fewer films than a studio actually made (it showed only the # of films released under the studio's current default name, rather than under ANY name).

Last but not least, the list of directors now lists the "Year of Birth", and it's possible to sort by it. This was inspired by a recent article by Russian animation historian Georgiy Borodin (george_smf) which talked about the generations of directors in Russian animation and what they had in common.

It goes without saying, but: it is possible that some new bugs were introduced as a result of all these changes. If you notice something, please contact me, either here or through private message on Animatsiya.net!

Addendum: RIP Eus347's Russian/Soviet animation channel (2021-2023)

At the end of August, 2023, a wonderful resource/library maintained by Eus347, his YouTube channel @eus347russianexussranimati2, got deleted as a result of 5 strikes in one day by the Estonian Film Institute. At the time, it had 766 videos (here's a full list of the titles), about 20 of which were from the EFI.

A similar thing had earlier happened in January 2021 (which I wrote about), at the time because of copyright strikes from Soyuzmultfilm LLC. Because of that, Eus avoided uploading Soyuzmultfilm titles to his new channel, and his translations for those could be instead seen on Animatsiya.net where they appeared together with videos from Soyuzmultfilm's official channels.

The just-deleted channel had many videos from other Soviet animation studios, as well as those that were outside the scope of Animatsiya.net. If you've seen any missing videos on the site recently, that could be why (though I've found replacements for most). There were also some subtitles on there that hadn't yet been added to Animatsiya.net, though I think I've saved most of them.

Eus is currently considering starting again, but this time with multiple channels grouped around a studio/set of studios/set of countries, so that a complaint from just one organization won't bring everything down. This makes sense to me, as many copyright owners on YouTube seem to be fine with their old films being uploaded if they get the revenue (as YouTube's system allows). I wish him all the best!

Hello, loyal Animatsiya.net visitors! It's been a while since the last official update!

For the past few weeks, I've been working hard on some new features for the site (that's why the frequency of updates gone down). Check them out, and please let me know if anything's broken!

1) LOCALIZATION



On the left sidebar of the site, there is now an option to "Only view films accessible to speakers of [language]". By default, this is enabled, and the "language" (which can be changed) is set to the default language of the website - on the main site, English. What this means is that you will only be shown films that are accessible in the language you've chosen - i.e. that have subtitles in that language, or have major amounts of dialogue in that language, or are wordless. So if you're a speaker of French, you can select "fr" from the dropdown menu, click "Update", and the selection of films on the front page will be changed to only those accessible to a French-speaker. They will be listed in the order that they became available in French (so if a film was added to the site 2 years ago, but somebody added French subtitles only recently, it will be near the top). The introductory text on the main page (saying how many films are available) is also updated depending on the language.



Not just the main page is updated: if you browse the list of directors, you'll only see the ones who have at least one film on the site accessible in your language. Same for studios, genres, animation techniques, decades, series. If you go to any particular list of films (from a director, studio, genre, decade, etc.) you'll only see the accessible ones, but the top of the list will have text that tells you how many others are on the site that still need subtitles (e.g. "5 listed out of 7 in database (2 films still need French subtitles)." - you can also click to see just a list of the inaccessible films). Most film lists (with the exception of directors' filmographies, which are listed chronologically) can also be sorted by "Availability" - the date that the film became available on the site in your language. It's the date on the upper right of the film info box.



Once you actually open a film page, the default subtitles will be in your chosen language, if they exist.



If you uncheck this feature, the website will just show all films, like it did before. The localization setting lasts only once you're on the site, and will reset once you leave. However, you can add parameters to the URL to get a shareable link to a particular setting.. adding "&allfilms" will turn localization off.
Some examples:
"animatsiya.net/?localization=fr" - set localization to "fr"
"animatsiya.net/director.php?directorid=226&localization=de" - see all films by director with ID 226 (Vladimir Popov) accessible to a German-speaker (also, localization will be set to "de", until you change it)
"animatsiya.net/studio.php?studioid=1&localization=fr&needsubtitles" - see all films from studio with ID 1 (Soyuzmultfilm) that still haven't been subtitled in French (also, localization will be set to "fr", until you change it)
"animatsiya.net/decade.php?1940s&allfilms" - see ALL films on the site from the 1940s (also, localization will be turned off, until you turn it on again)

P.S. For English, there are a few films interpreted as "inaccessible" which actually have hard-coded English subtitles in the video. I'll need to do something about that later.

2) BULGARIAN SITE



On the upper right of the site, there is now a Bulgarian flag. Thanks to translation work by Zhukorop (Жукороп), you can switch back and forth between a localized English and Bulgarian version of the website. Not everything is translated yet, but most of the site should be usable. All the film names are translated, and the director names are automatically converted to Bulgarian spelling rules. Film/director/studio descriptions are disabled on the Bulgarian site for now, the FAQ and DIY pages are not yet translated, and adding content can mostly only be done on the English site for now.

But I've worked on the backend to make it simple to update the translation in the future, and to add more languages. This brings me to the third major addition:

3) EASY SITE TRANSLATION



Under "Submit", there's now a "Site Translation" option that can be used by anyone with a user account who would like to help translate the whole site into another language. This is a pretty major undertaking and I expect only a few people will be interested - my initial motivation was to make it easier to work with Zhukorop on the Bulgarian site (it was a real chore pasting texts back and forth). But now that it's here, it can be used to quickly add other languages as well. It's designed to both make the translator's work really easy, and the make the Admin's work easy as well, so that a new translation can quickly be added and tested (and just as easily removed).

Basically, you select a language, then a list appears of all English text that needs translation, sometimes with an explanatory comment in light grey text beneath it. Anything that needs translating will have a bright-red box on the right. You type your translation into the text area on the right, then "Submit" (either "this" text, or "all" texts, for convenience). Once a text is submitted and turns green, it is saved to the server. You can log out at any time, and later resume from where you left off. There are a bunch of other details that you can read about on the page.

Once a translation looks ready to test, it will be added as an option to the site (unofficially at first).

P.S. I should add, since I didn't officially mention it before, I added the "Add Multiple" page to the site, which can be used to quickly find and translate the titles of wordless films that haven't yet been translated into some language. Some animatsiya.net members have been making good use of it.



4) VARIOUS BUGFIXES

a) Regular users can now delete their own comments & PMs, instead of asking an administrator to do it - use the red "X" on the upper right of one of your comments (reported by Жукороп)

b) You can now include paragraphs and BBCode markup in your profile "About" section (reported by Тихон)

c) Several bugs fixed on the "Add Subtitle" page:
The "Load video + subtitles preview" button on that particular page now actually works (a previous update broke it)
The video site now cannot be changed on that page (it should never have been possible, as it's only there to preview the subtitle)
The video is now always the "default" one, not a random one.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Please let me know, here or by contacting me directly through the site, what you think, and whether anything broke. There are more exciting features to come, but I'll speak of them when once they're ready...

Hi everyone! Animatsiya.net has recently hit the 1K films milestone, so I suppose I should write a little about where we're at at the moment.

The site's been visited by over 13,000 unique visitors since it opened, with each one clicking on ~10 film pages. Some of these visitors have made accounts and sent me thanks through the site's messaging system, or even contributed themselves (more on that below).

The Works of Decades

Some months after the site opened, I decided to add a menu option to browse the films by decade, because I noticed that the films of a particular time period tended to have a certain flavour (perhaps this a topic for a future post). In any case, it seems to be no worse a browsing method than to do it by genre, director or studio.

The earliest film on the site is from 1906, and the latest from 2020 (I've been too busy to check up on the more recent ones, to be honest). By decade, it currently breaks down like this:

1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s	1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s	2010s	2020s
4	5	12	34	35	59	88	135	224	148	140	114	2

Directors

The films are made by 418 different directors. There mostly hasn't been a particular order in which they've gotten added, but there HAS been a conscious attempt to translate and include the full filmography of a few of the more important directors, or at least what has survived. Notably:

Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg (35 films, made from 1928-1978)

Ivan Ivanov-Vano (26 films, 1934-1979 - the "patriarch" of Soviet animation for most of its existence. Actually, his very last film is not on the site yet, but soon will be)

Roman Kachanov (26 films, 1958-1986 - most famous for being the director of the "Cheburashka" series and "Secret of the Third Planet")

Ivan Maximov (25 films - one of the more interesting and distinctive modern directors, who makes wordless films about strange creatures)

Olga Hodatayeva (23 films, 1928-1960 - wife of the pioneer Nikolay, I'd say her films were characteristic for being "like the mainstream style of the time period, but better done than most")

Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya (19 films, 1947-1974 - her specialty was stories about heroic deeds)

Fyodor Hitruk (16 films, 1962-1983 - pioneer of stylized/limited animation in the 1960s, most famous for his excellent "Winnie the Pooh" series, but all his films are either gems or very good)

Yuriy Norshteyn (12 films, 1968-2003 - a Russian-Jewish director beloved by top animators around the world, working on an animated feature since the early 1980s...)

Nikolay Hodatayev (8 films, 1924-1935 - a Soviet animation pioneer whose career died in the mid-1930s with the forced switch away from cutout-animation and into Disney-copying)

Aleksandr Petrov (7 films, 1988-2006 - the country's only Oscar-winning animation director, painting his films with oil paint on glass)

Studios

115 different studios are represented, although the collection is skewed towards the big Moscow-based studios: Soyuzmultfilm (347 films), Ekran (127) and Pilot (54). Next after that: Ukraine's Kievnauchfilm (now Ukranimafilm, 48 films), Estonia's Tallinnfilm (26 films). Some other regional studios that are represented are Armenfilm (21), Georgia Film (19), Sverdlovsk Film Studio/A-Film from the Ural Mountains (18), Belarusfilm(18) and Uzbekfilm (15).

Subtitling

The purpose of the site was to create an accessible place to discover and watch animation from Russia and the former USSR, even for non-Russian speakers. So, since English is the leading language of international discourse (not to mention the one besides Russian that I'm proficient in), that meant adding English subtitles to as many of them as possible. Since the site opened, 433 English subtitles have been either created from scratch (about 1/4th, mostly by me) or updated to correct mistakes and improve them (about 3/4ths, mostly originally by Eus, a native Dutch-speaker who has subtitled probably over 1000 Russian animated films but often with mistakes because neither English nor Russian is his native language)

However, I've also been adding subtitles in other languages whenever I've found them, and some of the users have begun to contribute subtitles in their own languages.

Of the 1000 animated films on the site (actually, 1001 now):
394 are wordless and don't need any subtitles
633 have English subtitles (although 50 of those are wordless and don't strictly need them, so let's say 583).
304 have Russian subtitles (very useful for those learning the language... or for the deaf, of course)
99 Spanish
93 Czech
81 Vietnamese
23 Bulgarian
20 French
20 Slovak
11 Dutch
10 Turkish
There are also subtitles in other languages, but only fewer than 10 films.

You may notice that the languages with the most subtitles aren't always the most popular languages worldwide. Making these translations is a labour of love, and there are usually only a few people per language (or only one) who do this. For example, the high number of Vietnamese subs is due entirely to Cynir (aka. Duy Kiền or Vergilarchivum), who was translating them before animatsiya.net existed. The Bulgarian subs are almost all by Жукороп (Zhukorop), who is also a site member.

I also try to seek them out in other places, but every language (or closely-related group of languages) seem to have their own subtitles website, and perhaps for some languages I simply haven't found the location where those subtitles can be found.

Russian subs are currently to be found at subtitry.ru, by various people (earlier on, a great many were made by Elena from deafnet.ru - a website for the hard-of-hearing).

For Spanish subs, I find most of them on the profile page of Yefren (a Chilean) at SubDivX.com (he actually has over 250 there, most of which I haven't added yet). There are also a smattering by other Spanish-speakers: Jose RB (at his blog CineRusia), Kino, Kuroku, Otterkind (at KG), Ulises a few others. I think that Yefren, at least, has translated from Eus's English subs rather than directly from Russian; so since many those had mistakes before I corrected them, many Spanish subs may also need correcting.

All the Czech subs were made by two people: wero1000 (aka. robert.haring_) at OpenSubtitles.org at and at the Czech site CSFD.cz, and wauhelly at SubScene.com and at the West-Slavic site Titulky. As far as I can tell, both of them translate directly from Russian.

The Vietnamese subs are made and uploaded by Cynir to animatsiya.net and, according to him, can currently be found only here. Not all of them are on the site yet. Many of them were translated from Eus's old English subtitles, so the same disclaimer applies as for the Spanish subs.

The Bulgarian subs, as mentioned, are uploaded by Zhukorop to animatsiya.net. Originally, they were also at his Youtube channel, but that disappeared as such channels often do on Youtube. Me and Zhukorop are also working on a Bulgarian-language version of animatsiya.net! It's a lot of work and not quite ready yet, but it's well on its way.

Some French subtitles can be found at Alexios6's profile at OpenSubtitles.org, but I strongly suspect they were originally uploaded elsewhere. There may be a good source for French subtitles somewhere, but I haven't found it.

Slovak subtitles seem to all be by M.M. (M7797M), and can be found on his profile at Titulky. There are 60 there in total; I haven't added all of them yet.

Dutch subtitles are all by Eus - he mostly made English subtitles, but he made some in his native language too.

Future Plans

There are a number of things planned for the site, besides adding more films:

1) Playlists and collections - a big limitation currently is that one can only watch one film at a time, then you have to select a new one. This is less than ideal if you want to just relax for a while because most of the films on the site are short. So the plan is to allow users to create playlists just like on Youtube. You won't need to be signed in to do it, but being signed in will allow you to save the playlist for later, and you'll be able to either have it private or public. Also, you'll be able to make collections of playlists.

2) Adding a Bulgarian-language version of the site, then a Russian-language one. As mentioned, the Bulgarian one is currently being worked on by Zhukorop (the translation) and me (the implementation). The plan is that once you're on a language-specific version of the site, the only films that'll show up (at least, unless you directly type in the URL) are the ones that either have subtitles in that language or are wordless. Other languages with a respectable number of subtitles could be added too - for example, Czech, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. But it depends on whether people are willing to help with that.

3) Age-category ratings, possibly voting-based. Although I was resistant to this initially (because I thought that there were many films that appeal to different age groups), I think now that it would really help some people find what they're looking for. I don't think simply having a "NSFW/18+" genre is enough, because I've noticed that many films have nothing "18+" going on (in the sense of sex/violence), but mentally they are directed at a certain age level and those who aren't in it may not get much from them. This is true both of films directed at very young children, and of films directed at those well into adulthood... or those directed at teens, for that matter. So I propose to have ~4 age categories, something like 0-6, 7-13, 14-20, 21+. Anyone will be able to vote (+ or -) on whether they think a film is particularly WELL-suited, or ILL-suited to an age bracket. So you think a film is equally well-suited to all ages, you just don't give a rating at all. If you think it's really good for 0-6 year-olds, but other age groups will also be just fine watching it, give "0-6" a "+" and leave the rest alone. If you think a film is primarily aimed at those over 14, and would NOT be good for viewers 0-6, give a "-" to "0-6" and a "+" to both "14-20" and "21+".

4) Adding more video options besides Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. First priority (sites that also have good APIs, though less widely used): Archive.org (uses JW Player v 8.22.0), Rumble, PeerTube. Secondary priority (these seem to lack sophisticated player APIs, but many are still widely used at least in certain parts of the world): BiliBili, VK, RuTube, Aparat, Okko, BitChute, Mover.uz. Synched subtitles should be possible to get working for any video site with a player API that has an equivalent to Youtube's "getCurrentTime" method (most of them don't, though).

5) A public forum? I've been going back and forth on this, because it will likely make the community bigger, but will also probably require moderation. There's already the opportunity to contact anyone with an account on the site, and even to send messages to multiple people at once, kind of like in a Discord room. However, not many people use this feature.

P.S. Also, yes, since the last post on this blog back in December, a terrible thing has been happening. However, I don't want to write about it. I'll only say that a few months ago I saw an award-winning, surreal 2019 Ukrainian animation, Deep Love by Mykyta Lyskov, that I thought did a good job of capturing the feel of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) from a local's perspective. And also that Aleksandr Petrov (Russia's only Oscar-winning animation director) seems to have good foresight, because the animated feature he's currently in production on (and had been planning for over a decade) looks like it may be very topical once it comes out (it'll feature Aleksandr Nevsky and a major theme will reportedly be his diplomatic journeys to the East - to the Mongol Horde).

This is an overview of the Russian holiday-themed animated films that are currently available to be watched with English subtitles (or wordless) on Animatsiya.net, listed from earliest to latest. Each film will have a description, as well as a summary of what's good about it (why you may enjoy watching it), and what's bad about it (why you may not want to watch it).

I've recently either made new subtitle translations or fixed up the existing subtitles for quite a few of these.



Below, click on any of the images to watch the film. This article may be updated in the days to come. (Last update: Jan 4, 2021. Added the 1950 and 1988 films)

Each film below is rated; here's what the ratings mean:
**** - I loved it
*** - I liked it
** - I thought it was ok
* - I didn't like it
(no stars) - haven't watched it yet (or not recently)

A Little Background

Just like the winter holiday season contains two distinct celebrations in the West (Christmas and the New Year), so it is also in Russia. With the following difference:

In the West, the tradition of dressing up a fir tree, giving gifts and sweets to each other or to children, a mythical bearded old man distributing the gifts, and intimate family time, all stemming from pre-Christian traditions, are linked to Christmas (Dec 25). The New Year, by contrast, is basically a party.

On the other hand, in Russian Orthodox Christianity, the birth of Christ isn't celebrated on Dec. 25, where the Gregorian Calendar puts it, but, following the Older Julian calendar, around Jan. 7. In Russia, that day is currently strictly a Christian holiday.

The mid-winter gift-giving traditions are instead celebrated on the New Year. The Father Christmas figure is named "Ded Moroz" in Russian (Ded = Old Man/Grandpa, Moroz = Cold, Chill, Cold Weather), commonly translated into English as Father Frost, Grandpa Frost or King Winter. Originally, he was the personification of the winter's cold, and was responsible for its worst weather. In some Russian fairy tales, he continues living even in the summer in places such as the bottoms of wells.

Gradually, his character became softer, probably influenced by the Western Santa Claus traditions, and sometimes this goes so far that he becomes more gnome-like and indistinguishable from Santa Claus. You'll see this with some of the films below. It really depends on the director. In other films, he retains the ability to travel by turning himself into a gust of snow.

In the West, Santa Claus traditionally has a few characters who appear with him - his wife, Mrs. Claus, his elves who make the presents, his reindeer (including that famous one, Rudolf). I suppose the models for all these came from the American Rankin Bass puppet animations. In Russia (and nearby countries), Grandpa Frost is often accompanied by the Snow Maiden (Snegurochka, who is sometimes his daughter and sometimes created out of snow), by a Snowman (who is his helper in various roles - for example, driving him around), or by the personified New Year. He doesn't typically associate with elves or reindeer, nor does he climb down chimneys (perhaps this is largely because most Russians lived in apartments with no chimneys to speak of).

The Films
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Sergey Alibekov of Uzbekistan has a rather small filmography (only 4 films as director, thus far), but each of them is different and unique in some way, all of them are quite well-done, and (unusually) all of them are adult-oriented.

You can click on the images below to go to animatsiya.net and view his films with English subtitles. The biographical details in the following text come mainly from the director's profile on fdculture.com, and from this interview on Sputnik News.

Alibekov started out as art director. He did the art for Uzbekfilm's bleak and brilliant adaptation of the Ray Bradbury sci-fi story There Will Come Soft Rains, which won lots of recognition and praise, and counts Britain's Prince Charles among its fans.



Then he was art director for two more films, A Golden Leaf (1985) and The Garden of Crysanthemum (1986) (listed at animator.ru).

Alibekov seems to have been part of a particular team at Uzbekfilm who made similar films around late 1980s-early 1990s. It seems to have been a very small but efficient and productive artistic group. According to Alibekov, the late 1980s was the golden era of Uzbek animation - there was total creative freedom with full state support. It is a pity that many of the films from this period seem to be currently inaccessible.

From 1988, Alibekov began to direct on his own, and began to make very personal, auteur films. He used a different animation technique in each film, and they all feel quite different, too!



The first, Pause, is an abstract rumination about art and control using cutout animation.

I personally find it hard to make out what is going on in Pause, partly because the image is so dark and the existing video (the only one available right now) is too low-resolution to do justice to the art. It seems to be about an artist in a state of limbo, new freedoms suddenly being given freely (e.g. dandelion seeds being like keys flying about, but then being actually constrained in where they fly by glass), and then the artist passing on and trying to turn his writings into a bird that will fly out into the world. That's as far as I got.



Alibekov's second film, The Thread (1989), co-directed with Svetlana Muratkhodzhayeva, used paint-on-glass and is a very moving reflection of an a old man's last days of life and death.

The director was the sole animator, and animated it daily over a period of 7 months. The technique (made most-famous by the Oscar-winner Aleksandr Petrov) required that he destroy or slightly modify each previous image to make the next one. I found it to be very well-done technically and very moving. Yes, "somewhat surreal film about an old man at the end of his life" is not an uncommon niche in Russian/Soviet animation (several other directors have one of those in their filmography - Sivokon's Snow Will Cover the Roads (2004), and Petkevich's There Lived a Tree (1996) come to mind), but this one is particularly well-conceived and well-executed.



Alibekov's third film, By the Puddle (1990) is a ridiculous and grotesque 3D plasticine animation that reminds one of the early Aardman films.

It is a complete stylistic and thematic break from the director's earlier films, and is grotesque and quite funny (and also a little bit not-safe-for-work). I recently made English subtitles for it. If there is a common element with Alibekov's other films, it's that this one too has a point; it's not just funny for the sake of being funny. It's about how easy it is to talk of high matters, but mundane concerns will ultimately cause someone to come back down to earth (quite literally, in this case).

After this film was made, in the early 1990s, the studio's funding from the state dried up and Uzbek animation collapsed with it, so Alibekov stopped doing animation for the next decade did only painting.



Alibekov's fourth film is a heavy, surreal political metaphor animated in stop-motion with plasticine as well as other materials, made for Uzbekfilm from 2001-2003. Some funding had appeared again, the studio's director offered him a project, and Alibekov jumped at the chance. He wrote the screenplay in a week. In total, they used 200kg of plasticine for the 20 minutes of film. At one point, they ran out of plasticine in Tashkent (the capital city of Uzbekistan), and had to go to Moscow to buy more.

The film uses a similar technique to his 1991 film, but is rather abstract, and heavy with political and social meaning - by his own admission "difficult to watch for someone who is not prepared". The specific topic is a matter of some confusion. In one source, he claims it was about "the full catastrophe of the collapse of the USSR". But the description of the version of the film posted to Youtube, uploaded with the blessing of the director, says that it's about post-Soviet events.

Personally, I think the latter explanation is more likely correct. In that light, it is interesting to compare this film with Flad Fesenko's 1992 Ready Or Now, Here I Come! (or "I Go Seek"), also a political film using the cinematic language of surrealism made at Uzbekfilm but a decade earlier, whose contents I analyzed a decade ago here. As I wrote back then, "surrealism [...] is not about being random; it's about using unconventional symbols to portray something that is invisible to the naked eye."

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With little work to be found in Uzbekistan, Alibekov moved to Moscow at the age of 50, around the year 2005. He learned how to draw on the computer (which took him half a year) and, after a few years, became a very sought-after art director. He worked on blockbusters such as Turkish Gambit (2005) and, more recently, Viking (2016).

While in Moscow, he started another film based on Leo Tolstoy's work What Men Live By (Чем люди живы). It was to be 30 minutes long. He worked 7-8 years on preparation, then got some government funding, but only half of the minimum amount that was needed - only enough for the visuals. Nevertheless, he began work. Got about 4 minutes done, then got sick with thyroid cancer and needed an operation. They had to give back the money to the government, and it is not clear now what will happen with the project.

Despite living in Moscow, Alibekov still keeps in touch with people back in Uzbekistan, who tell him that they like what's going on there (film-wise), but he's waiting to see what the results will actually be. I also see some encouraging signs from the Uzbek animation scene, if approachable, funny cartoons such as Dmitriy Vlasov's One Hundred Sacks of Snow (2008) are representative.

Overall, Alibekov's trajectory is not unlike that of many other people in animation from the former Soviet sphere. There was a period in the late 1980s-early 1990s during which a lot of animation in the former Soviet space began to have serious themes and artistic experimentation - much of which came to an end in the 1990s as the economies collapsed and funding dried up. People reacted to this in different ways - some managed to stay within the shrinking state-funded animation scene, some moved out of animation entirely and turned to painting or book illustration (as did the Ukrainian Irina Smirnova), others moved to doing commercial work for foreign companies (as did many people from Pilot studio, such as Igor Kovalyov and Vladlen Barbè), others hunkered down and tried to raise their own money for their independent projects, either quite successfully (Garry Bardin) or not so much (Yuriy Norshteyn).

It also reflects a wider trend in history in which the collapses of big empires are typically presaged by a flowering of the arts within the empire - to the point that this is actually one of the warning signs of societal collapse. I suppose from this perspective, the current relatively-more-boring cultural output of the Russian animation scene is a good sign. ;)

UPDATE (2023-09-14): added links to Golden Leaf and The Garden of Crysanthemum, both of which were unavailable when this article was first written, but have since been scanned by the RuTracker animation film scanning project.

Recently I've added her films to the Animatsiya.net database, and improved the English translations (significantly so, for the 2nd film), so I think it's a good time to write a few words.

Born in Rostov-on-Don in 1980, Irina Litmanovich graduated from art school in Voronezh in 1995, and lived in Israel between 1997 and 2004, where she completed her first film The Letter in 2002, based on the work of Daniil Harms (not currently online, but here's some concept art from her LJ account: 1 2 3 4 5).

In 2004, she moved back to Russia, did some work for Pilot Studio's Mountain of Gems series, and graduated from the Advanced Courses for Directors at the SHAR School-Studio (workshop of Fyodor Hitruk and Aleksey Demin), with her diploma work being the short comedic Jewish-themed film Khelom's Customs, which was quite well-received. She has since made two other films at Aquarius Film studio, and done illustrations for some books. Her official website has more information.

The style of her films seems to be inspired by the films of Yuriy Norshteyn (though her animation technique is not as complex). Only the first is an all-ages film. Though the others are each at least partly about childhood, they are not for children. All of them have won awards at different film festivals.

Click on the images below to watch the films with English subtitles on Animatsiya.net:



Litmanovich's Khelom's Customs (2005) is approachable, charming, funny, well-constructed, and has great music. It's the sort of thing that probably can be shown to anyone without needing any sort of preparation.

It's adapted from a charming poem by the Jewish Soviet poet Ovsey Driz (read it in the original Russian here) about a European Jewish town that has a mouse problem, but each cure they try only makes matters worse.



In Household Romance (2010), there almost isn't a story, just a sequence of events that follow one another, some of which are related or follow from earlier events (the "Voice of America", the war song...). But a story does not really seem to be the point, rather it is to lovingly record the "mundane" things that made up Litmanovich's cherished childhood in the Soviet early 1980s; to capture the overall mood. The basic idea is summed up in the last scene of the film, which shows our three characters (father, mother and daughter) each doing their own thing, yet peacefully sharing the same space. The piano that is played by the girl's father in the film was in fact actually performed by Irina Litmanovich's father.

The film's biggest flaw is probably that it often lacks forward momentum - but sometimes one is in the mood for precisely a film like this, which can be watched without stress. One of my favourite Russian animated films, The Lodgers of an Old House, is like this as well. Also, my favourite parts of Norshteyn's Tale of Tales (which I suspect was at least some of the inspiration for this film), were like that too. Though it is like Tale of Tales in that it is an attempt to "pin" the director's childhood on film, it is unlike it in being entirely grounded in the real world and having no surreal/dream logic at all.



However, this changes with Litmanovich's next film Hand Crafted Clouds (2015). This one is a sort of romance about two people, and consists of vignettes of scenes with their interactions, from early childhood, to maturity, all the way until old age, after one of the two is left alone. These vignettes often stray into dream-logic territory (especially in the middle of the film), and it can be hard to know when precisely this happens. It is a long film, and (like Hrzhanovskiy's Lion with a Grey Beard) a fair amount of screen time is spent on the end of the story. Actually, I found the end to be (masterfully done and) quite devastating - but we need to watch films like this too, to prepare ourselves for when these things happen to us as well.

I do not know if Litmanovich will make another film. Gathering the resources for them seems to be a struggle.

The budget for Hand Crafted Clouds was 2,200,000 rubles (~$30,000 US), of which the Russian Ministry of Culture paid 70%, while just over half of the remaining 30% (600,000 rubles) was raised through the crowd-funding site planeta.ru, and the rest through anonymous big donors. In 2019, she announced that she was starting another animated film titled One Day from the Life of Aleksandr Volodin (a Soviet playwright) with a total budget of 7,000,000 (~$96,250 USD), of which 2,000,000 rubles had already been raised. The modest planeta.ru campaign concluded successfully, but she was left with another 4,500,000 rubles yet to raise. I'm not sure if there's been any news since.

I hope that this is not the end, because she has a unique voice and I've enjoyed everything I've seen from her.

I recently came across a real gem - a Soviet 1941 cartoon with wonderful art direction (inspired by early 1930s American cartoons) and character animation that is leaps and bounds above most of the other films of the young studio during the same period. It is the first cartoon adaptation of Chukovskiy's famous children's poem "Chatty Fly" (Muha-Tsokotuha), about a fly who finds a coin and goes to buy a samovar.






Our main character, Chatty Fly (Muha-Tsokotuha)


The mosquito who will save the day

It can be watched on Animatsiya.net (CLICK HERE) with a new English translation that I made for it, as well as the 1960 remake (but I prefer the original). The translation keeps the original rhyme scheme, and I'm rather proud of it.

Unfortunately, the cartoon was finished only hours before Germany attacked the USSR, and as a result had practically no distribution. After the war, with the negative damaged and the sound apparently lost, the studio eventually decided to make a colour remake. But they gave it to a different director (Roman Davydov) who made quite a few changes.



The co-director of the 1941 film, Boris Dyozhkin, was not a fan, though he liked the colour. The original 1941 version was totally inaccessible until being restored only a few years ago, by using the soundtrack from the 1960 film (which used the same sheet music), as well as some newly-recorded sounds.

Since some things in 1960 were different, you may notice when watching it that there are some sounds that don't correspond to the 1941 version. For example: the fly's caterpillar is heard barking, but doesn't really. The cut to the fly jumping on flowers is a bit sudden. Perhaps most obviously, at 2:41 the voice saying the final line is an octave below the fly's. Still, it fits remarkably well overall.

The 1941 film was uploaded on culture.ru this spring. It is no longer there, but can still be found in some other places (e.g. RuTracker).







The details of this restoration, as well as more info on the film, are related below in an article written by Russian animation historian Georgiy Borodin, originally published in the 2019 catalogue of the "Belyye Stolby" film festival. The translation is a little awkward in some spots, but it should be understandable.

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THE FATE OF THE FLY
By Georgiy Borodin

Many sources have noted that the film "Chatty Fly" by Vladimir Grigoryevich Suteyev, based on the eponymous fairy tale by K.I. Chukovskiy, was surrendered to the film management a few hours before the start of the Great Patriotic War. Documents indicate that the production of the film ended on June 17, 1941, and the distribution certificate (passport) for it was dated June 23rd. Obviously, wide distribution of the film did not take place - it was prevented not only by the ten-minute format, but also by the outbreak of the war. However, the film was remembered by many professionals - in particular, Ye. T. Migunov recalled watching it in the hall of the Soyuzmultfilm studio:
“…I'm watching a scene from "Chatty Fly"… A villainous spider with a cobweb-lasso, accompanied by a mad percussive beat by [Hungarian-Czech-Soviet jazz drummer] Laszlo Olah, captivates and entangles the poor Fly. The scene is immaculately, logically developed in full accordance with the musical outline, dashingly drawn, executed with broad strokes. A contrast of movements and pauses. A piercing dynamic scheme. Nothing is wasted. Free-style drawing, impudence and plasticity. And what power!
This was autumn '41. The early days of "practice" at Soyuzmultfilm. In the pause between bombings, we sat in the studios's small viewing room.
The little assistant-planner Varenka Shilina, "assigned" to us, whispers: "This is Dyozhkin's scene! Watch and learn!" I recognize Dyozhkin's hand. The legendary Dyozhkin, favorite and pride of the studio. The film was made in the pre-war year. Recently completed and handed over. Literally - right before the war. I am stunned with admiration...".
The functions of Boris Petrovich Dyozhkin in the film crews of the pre-war films by V.G. Suteyev (“We're Also Going to the Olympics!”, “Chatty Fly”) included, by all indications, control over animation. We can safely assume that, in addition to making his own scenes, Dyozhkin participated in the distribution of tasks, the acceptance and editing of the finished work of the animators, which is why the plastic side of these films is noticeably more perfect and more integral than in many films of previous years and even in the films of other directors of the studio that were made at the same time.

In 1950, the Soyuzmultfilm quality control dpt. stated that the negative of "Chatty Fly" could not be admitted to print due to a partial defect of the image (from poor processing-washing, yellow spots appeared on one meter of the negative) and the absence of the soundtrack (apparently lost during the war). The flick became become a legend, inaccessible, almost lost.

In the late 1950s, it was decided to make a color remake of Suteyev's film. This decision was motivated, in particular, by the fact that there was virtually no distribution of the 1941 version. The creation of a new version was entrusted to the animation artist Roman Vladimirovich Davydov, who had worked on the first film - a director and artist with his own graphic and editing “signature”, different from Suteyev's and Dyozhkin's. To create the musical score for the film, the score of Aleksey Nikolayevich Sokolov-Kamin, which had been preserved in the archives, was used. Apparently, the recording of the orchestra was timed "to the image" of the 1941 version. The color scheme belongs to Viktor Aleksandrovich Nikitin. The cartoon partially copies the plasticity of the pre-war film, but does not completely coincide with it.
After the studio premiere of the updated "Chatty Fly", B.P. Dyozhkin told V.A. Nikitin that he had no complaints about his work, unlike Roman Davydov's, with whom he would "have a serious chat."

For many years, Suteyev's film has been judged by the color version of R.V. Davydov, which was completed in 1960 and received such a harsh assessment by B.P. Dyozhkin. However, a comparison of the two versions shows that Davydov really seriously reworked the original film, and the artistic decisions of Suteyev and Dyozhkin were significantly modified at the same time. First, Davydov changed the types of many characters, including the fly herself, who in his version took on a completely different look. Second, in a number of places he diluted the editing with close-ups, which was not in Suteyev's version. Third, in many episodes, Davydov added new details to the action or, on the contrary, abandoned those that were present in the 1941 film. This applies to both animation and editing. For example, in the scene of tea drinking, the characters moving on the lower layer were replaced by static ones drawn on the background; in the final episode, the theme of a quarrel and reconciliation between Fly and Mosquito was added, the ending was completely changed, and much else. Fourth, in the episode of the gathering of guests to congratulate the Fly, he swapped two rather large sections. Finally, he completely changed the scene of the appearance of the Spider, of its running out of the tree hollow, "breaking" the plastic pattern given by Dyozhkin (a two-time repetition of three "bars": running, muttering, stamping feet).

The idea of ​​reconstructing the soundtrack of the 1941 "Chatty Fly" using the sound of the 1960 remake arose on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the birth of B.P.Dyozhkin in 2014. It was then that a positive copy of "Fly"-41, printed by the Gosfilmofond for the Soyuzmultfilm studio in the 1990s, was digitized. However, due to the obstacles posed by some of the studio's employees at the time, it was not possible to complete this work by the deadline (for the Kinoproba festival held in Yekaterinburg in early December). The second attempt to implement such a plan was made at the turn of 2017 and 2018. Thanks to the help of Aleksandra Yevseyeva, who carried out the technical part of this painstaking work, the results of the joint work were presented to the Soyuzmultfilm employees at the beginning of 2018.

The main difficulty was "fitting" the soundtrack to the image with the recreation of the effect of the unity of the drawn movement with the music. In the course of this work, it was necessary to combine visual accents with musical ones, moving the sound track relative to the image literally by fractions of a second. The sound speed of the digital recording had to be changed (the soundtrack was taken from a licensed disc, recorded using the 25 fps system). Unfortunately, it was not possible to remove some noises and cues that were absent in the black and white version. The sound of the different sections, rearranged in the new version by R.V. Davydov, was "stitched" relatively easily due to the fact that Davydov divided the scene into two parts exactly along the border of musical measures. But for the section with the appearance of the Spider from the tree hollow, an adequate sound solution was not found. To get an idea of ​​the original musical accompaniment of this fragment, we asked for help from the artistic director and chief conductor of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra of Cinematography Sergey Ivanovich Skripka and the director of the orchestra's concerts Sergey Kapkov, thanks to whom the orchestral score of this episode was found and copied. However, in the absence of any budget, we had to limit ourselves to a partial, very approximate synchronization of this section with the existing fragments of the audio track, which, unfortunately, does not give a clear idea of ​​the original artistic solution of Suteyev and Dyozhkin. Hopefully in the future it will be possible to create a more accurate sound reconstruction.

Nevertheless, I believe that we have reached the fullest possible approximation to the version of the film which was completed by V.G. Suteyev in June 1941. Now this half-lost picture has regained the ability of a full-fledged impact upon an audience and returns to cinematography, without losing its primary quality - sound-plastic integrity and polish.