Animatsiya in English

This is Part 3 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, reviewing 31 films. Part 2 was written in December 2023, adding 17 new films. This part covers 12 films newly added to the site since then. All of them 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.

Firefly 8 (1968) **

The final entry in the Firefly series - a "film-journal" of short cartoons for kids. It would be replaced by the similar but more artistically daring Merry-Go-Round the following year. The 3rd and final story takes place around a holiday tree, though it’s not especially seasonal otherwise.
The good: Animated versions of some popular characters from Soviet children’s magazines of the time. Each story has a little moral. The second one ("Gimmebuythatgiftmea") is amusing for parents.
The bad: Engaging for kids, but less so for adults. Quite average.

A Fir Tree Was Born in the Wood (1972) **

The good: It is based on a very well-known winter holiday song, which is well-sung. It more-or-less has the right holiday atmosphere.
The bad: The art direction is not very inspired (a bit like American low-budget TV animation of the period). The song is interrupted before it finishes and the final lines are changed to insert a message about how the tree shouldn’t really be cut down.

Well, Just You Wait (8) (1974) ****

Wolf chases Bunny through a crowd of people celebrating the coming New Year. Along the way, they sing a duet with Bunny as Father Frost (the Russian Santa Claus) and Wolf as his daughter, the Snow Maiden.
The good: A classic, beloved winter holiday cartoon. Lots of action and humour. Plenty of fun scenes, and holiday atmosphere.
The bad: Like always with this series, if you’re looking for depth, you won’t find it. But it’s far less repetitive (due to the many changes of location in each episode) than the Western "Tom & Jerry" that it’s often compared to.

The Fir (1981) ***

The life story of a fir tree, set to classical piano music.
The good: Atmospheric and relaxed, with good music and painted animation.
The bad: Very short (like the other films by Samsonov in this "series"), the ending is quite sudden. A deeper but sadder version of this story is told in The Little Fir (1983).

Wonderful New Year’s Night (1984) ***

Rejected toys from a factory come alive and begin to look for a home.
The good: A surprisingly sweet Estonian winter holiday puppet animation, made more in the style of the 1960s than the 1980s.
The bad: Possibly a bit slow for some? I can’t find anything else bad to say, really, though I don’t think it’s the best film ever, either.

The Blue Arrow (1985) ****

The good: An absolutely charming puppet animation with great holiday spirit, warm feelings and an engaging (and slightly strange) plot.
The bad: This is probably a great simplification of Gianni Rodari’s original novel, so I don’t know what those who are familiar with it will think.

A Lacy Fairy-Tale (1992) ***

The good: Nice folk songs, relaxed, old-timey atmosphere. Slightly odd story in which Father Frost seems to be a young lad who falls in love with a kindred "artist".
The bad: The art, though often nice, is also amateurish in places. The film develops slowly and the plot is rather thin.

Yuletide Stories (1994) ***

Two beautiful, religious Christmas-themed stories. About the night of Christ’s birth, and a good deed that is remembered many decades later
The good: Excellent art direction, music and direction. A very peaceful and introspective atmosphere, like some other Belarusian films around the same time.
The bad: The English translation isn’t as effective as the Russian original, especially for the firt story. Also, I think the atmosphere is stronger than the plots themselves.

The Little Angel (2008) ***

A story about how a Christmas tree toy - a little wax angel - changed everything in the heart of a boy deprived of his mother’s love. Based on a story by Leonid Andreyev, and a poem by Vladimir Nabokov.
The good: Well-drawn, animated with paint-on-glass. Hopeful and wholesome.
The bad: The film does its best to be optimistic, downplay the bad parts of the boy’s character, and assume that the "religious awakening" leads to a happy ending, while the original story is more ambivalent about how much of a difference it can or will ultimately make to the fates of the characters beyond that one Christmas night. Because of that, the story comes across as more honest.

Catboy and the New Year (2016) **

The good: Neat idea: a film based on the drawings & story of a child who misinterprets some of the things adults talk about in amusing ways. A bit like a modern version of the Brumberg sisters' famous Big Troubles (1960), but not as sharp.
The bad: It feels a little artificial. Not all references are understandable unless you live there. It feels like a warmup for the later Pushkin cartoon based on children’s drawings from the same studio: My Pushkin (2023)

Fir Trees (2017) ***

The good: Nice animation (as is often the case from Sharafutdinov). An emotional roller-coaster ride.
The bad: An emotional roller-coaster ride; bizarre sudden tone change from wacky to absolutely depressing.

Umka at the Holiday Tree (2019) **

The good: the "unfinished" story from the 1st two films is finally finished, adapted from the concluding story written by the original author. The art style tries to stay close to the original. There is a bit of the lyricism from the first two films.
The bad: Something about it feels off. It feels quite "modern" and even somewhat hyper. Maybe the stories didn’t need to be finished? It really seemed to me like the open-ended endings of the first two film was a big part of their DNA. Each of them ends with two characters who love each other separated and not knowing if they’ll ever see each other again. On the one hand, I can see the appeal in "finishing" things, but on the other hand…​

P.S. My apologies for posting this list so late in the month. I was delayed while I fixed a new bug that had begun to prevent most VK video thumbnails on the site from loading.

When I first opened Animatsiya.net at the start of 2021, the site had just over 150 films on it.



At that time, I wrote that eventually there would be at least 1500, or even several thousand. Well, it took a while, but we're there now; there are currently nearly 1700 animated films from the former USSR and successor states, 1153 of them subtitled in English and other languages. I've had especially enthusiastic help from Bulgarian, Estonian and Vietnamese users.

For all that time, the search system at animatsiya.net/films.php had stayed pretty much the same. It allowed you to filter the site's films in various ways, to find exactly what you're looking for (by search term, genre, film language, subtitle language, animation technique, year of release, director, studio, translator, translator role, favourite) and also sort them in various ways (by English name, original name, year, length, studio, director, newest subtitle - later, I added "availability in X language" and "wordiness").

However, under the hood this worked by loading ALL data for ALL films from the database, then using miket-dev's multiselect JavaScript library for the filters at the top of the page, and javve's ListJS to hide unwanted films from the list and add pagination.



This worked great when there were just 150 or so films on the site - the films loaded quickly, and the results updated instantly with each search or filter change. The images were lazily loaded only as the user scrolled to them. But as the database grew, the "films.php" page slowly became unusable. The loading time to load all the films before the user could even do anything gradually grew to over a minute, and at some point started timing out entirely.

I put a band-aid over the problem by making it possible to use the search box at the upper right corner of the main page. Previously, it would go the films.php and load all films, then filter them based on the search term on the front-end. Now, it would only return from the database those films whose titles or descriptions included the search term. But that only helped if the search term didn't return too many results. It was also possible to use the menu on the left of the main page to browse by director, genre and other categories... however, even some of those categories were beginning to take a very long time to load.

Besides that, films.php was an obvious attack vector for anyone who wanted to crash the site by overloading its bandwidth. It was easy enough for a poorly-written bot to even just do it accidentally. I ended up writing a custom DDOS-protection script that didn't let the same user (identified by IP address) load the page too frequently, and would make them wait 30 seconds less the time elapsed since they had last visited the page.

The solution to these problems was obvious - I had to load just a limited number of films at a time (say, 25 or so), not all of them at once, and allow the user to see the rest via pagination. But this would mean either removing the front-end filtering functionality that I was so proud of... or rewriting it all on the back-end. The SQL query that gets the film data would need to be modified with every change to exactly reflect the options selected by the user in the UI.

I knew that it was going to be a lot of work, so for a long time, I focused on adding "content" instead. After all, that's the main reason people visit the site, isn't it? Some noteworthy projects I did instead of fixing the site during this time:

• Translating the restored 1940s cartoons that Soyuzmultfilm released to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany day this May.
• Translating Hrzhanovskiy's award-winning Based on the Drawings of A. S. Pushkin trilogy, seeking and combining the very best available English translations of the Pushkin poems, or translating them myself, in rhyme, when none existed
• Translating various newly-restored Ukrainian animations (e.g. Aleksandr/Oleksandr Viken's A Favour)
• Translating various obscure but interesting films from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan
• Translating The Snow Maiden (1952) based on the original operatic libretto, in the style of Early Modern English.
• Translating Senka the African (1927), the first Soviet animation for children
• Checking and approving submissions by various other editors who've been helping out

In any case, I finally started to do the long-overdue technical work in November. Every time the user's settings changed, an AJAX call would be made from the JavaScript frontend to the PHP backend, an SQL query would be constructed, a partial list of films would be returned, and the section of the page containing the film list would be replaced.

Around this time, I came across an article on HackerNews called "Your URL is Your State". I thought it made a lot of sense and resolved to use it as a guide. Every time the film list was reloaded, the URL would also change and save the state of the user's search settings. This would also make it possible to use the browser's forward/back buttons, bookmark a search or copy the URL and send it to others.

Like that article suggests, I made sure to minimize the length of the URL whenever possible. Any default setting (e.g., the default order the films are sorted in, which in films.php is by English name, while in the studio and director lists, is by year) is not added to the URL. Anything like "favourite=true" is shortened to just "favourite" (its very presence is evaluated as "true", while its absence implies "false").

I added a big "Update search results" button to minimize the frequency with which the film list is updated (since this requires a call to the database every time, now). Otherwise, the page would start reloading every time any change was made even if the user wasn't finished setting things up yet, which would get old fast.



On the other hand, I decided that typing into the "search" box should automatically send the AJAX call and update the film list once the user is finished typing... so I wrote a function to have a half-second timer that starts when the user begins typing. If they change anything in the text box, the timer resets. Once they've stopped typing for half a second, only then does the AJAX request get sent and the film list updates.

While the update is in process (or the user is typing), I've made it so that a little round arrow rotates just above the film list (this is done with CSS).

Once the HTML is received from the backend and the film list has updated, the rotating arrow is replaced with a green checkmark.



When the user types into the "search" box, the SQL query searches that term in the film titles (in any language), the description, the director names, the studio names, and series names.

Now that this has all been completed (despite suffering from one of the most nasty flus I've ever had), I can share with you some potential searches you can do, and the URL string:

• Films about dogs, chronologically: sortby=year&search=dog
• Films that are in Russian and have English subtitles, but have the lowest "wordiness" (words per unit of time): language=ru&subtitlelanguage=en&sortby=wordiness
• Films that combine live action & 2D cel animation: techniqueid=2,9&strict (note the "strict" parameter; this limits the search to only films that have BOTH live-action and 2D cel animation, not just one of them)
• Puppet & 3D stop-motion animated films, from longest to shortest: techniqueid=4,6&sortby=length&sortdirection=desc"
• All films that use cutout animation from Soyuzmultfilm studio, chronologically: techniqueid=3&studioid=1&sortby=year
• Favourites from "Ekran", the main Soviet TV animation studio, sorted by director name: studioid=11&sortby=director&favourite ("favourite" means award winning, popular, or overlooked gem. Admittedly, not entirely an objective category)
• Films with subtitles that I made whose quality "needs work": subtitlequality=needs_work&translatorid=1 (often because I couldn't hear something properly)

You can also follow the careers of film directors who started out working together and then went their separate ways:
• Vladimir Polkovnikov & Leonid Amalrik: directorid=48,139&sortby=year
• Aleksandr Tatarskiy & Igor Kovalyov: directorid=27,11&sortby=year
• Vladimir Pekar & Vladimir Popov: directorid=189,226&sortby=year
• The original five founders of the Merry-Go-Round series - Anatoliy Petrov, his wife Galina Barinova, Gennadiy Sokolskiy, Leonid Nosyrev and Valeriy Ugarov: directorid=54,32,125,233,225&sortby=year

So, to all my visitors (especially those who submit duplicate films, you know who you are!), there is now no longer any need to be afraid of "films.php", or indeed any of the other pages that have a film list! All links should now load quickly, and not give you any timeouts.

I did, however, keep director.php exactly as it was before - it's the only page with a fancy film list that still uses ListJS. For example, see the filmography of Ivan Ivanov-Vano, the "patriarch of Soviet animation". No director has more than 50 films to their name, so loading times are still snappy, and the instant search results and page changes are nice.

Over the past year or two, it has become more and more obvious that AI-assisted development is the way of the future. While developing the site this past month and a half, I used it as well - but still in a somewhat limited way. I didn't give it my whole code as a context; rather, I used it to speed things up when I was able to exactly explain to it a simplified version of a problem and what I wanted to achieve, but couldn't remember the syntax or specific features of the language that would allow me to achieve it. I'd ask it for something that I thought should be possible. Either I would be correct, or I would discover the exact ways in which I was wrong and rethink the problem. Generally, I've found that AI is quite good at these sorts of tasks (probably because it was designed by people who are both qualified and motivated to judge the quality of its work in this sphere). Certainly, much better than it is at translation, where the incidences of hallucination seem to be a lot higher (if you aren't fluent in both languages, beware of using AI for translation!).

I tried to thoroughly test everything, but it's possible that new bugs were introduced. If you notice anything wrong, please tell me! This October, I fixed a major bug that made it impossible for new accounts to be registered. It had actually existed since mid-2024, but nobody had mentioned it to me for over a year, and meanwhile all my usual collaborators were still editing the site, so I didn't notice anything wrong!

Some other smaller things I've fixed since the last update:
• Improved loading speed of front page (could still be better, though)
• Fixed subtitle history not showing up
• Fixed various bugs with the "site updates" page (e.g. if two translators were added at the same time, the first name would be listed twice instead of both names)
Fixed Dailymotion videos cutting off top & bottom of image when in fullscreen (it's actually still a bit glitchy - sometimes one needs to exit fullscreen and enter it again)
• Fixed fullscreen not working for VK videos (caused by a change on their end)
• Discovered that VK Videos didn't work in Firefox if "Enhanced Tracking Protection" was on. Added FAQ entry about how to disable it. I was going to look into this more, but haven't found the time.

However, there are a lot of issues still outstanding. In particular, some of the issues I identified at the bottom of the first post announcing the site are still not fixed! The lack of a dedicated mobile site is particularly egregious, in these days when everyone is on phones. The site does work on a phone, but looks ugly and has many layout issues. Perhaps that should be next.

Updated Nov. 3, 2025 (intro, conclusion, "Fedya Zaytsev" section).
Updated Dec. 5, 2025 ("A Calm Forest Meadow" section).

To mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet (and Russian) victory against Nazi Germany, Soyuzmultfilm spent the month of May 2025 uploading restored copies of its cartoons from the 1940s to YouTube and VKVideo.

The restorations seem to be very well done. They were being uploaded at a rate of about one a day until mid-May. Although initially it seemed like there would be 20 in total (based on the list here, which also includes films from later years that are about the war, as well as beloved films made shortly after the war), the final number uploaded online was 14, dating from 1941 to 1948. After May 9 (Victory Day), all the rest of the films uploaded were from the post-war period. The change is quite noticeable, with the most obvious being that all of them are in colour from that point on. Besides uploading them on video hosting sites, they were also being shown in Russian theatres with free admission.

Most of them already have English subtitles, and I'll try to get to all of them eventually. Also, check out the full list of 1940s Soviet cartoons at Animatsiya.net (plus I'd add a few from 1939).

More details about the films and their literary sources can be found at the links.

Notes about the translation added in italics.

May 1 - Telephone / Телефон (1944)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

Based on the famous children's poem by Korney Chukovsky, with the living author himself starring in the live action portion of the cartoon. This might be the most impressive cartoon made in those years in terms of art style and technique (although there isn't much of a plot). The director, Tsehanovskiy, used to be a renowned children's book illustrator, and had collaborated in Leningrad with Shostakovich. This was his first solo film made after escaping to Moscow from the blockade of Leningrad, in which many of his former colleagues died. Unlike his Leningrad films, this one had to be made in black & white. The film is full of many clever visual little details. Notably, unlike his FIRST film at Soyuzmultfilm, this one LOOKS like it was made by his old team at Lenfilm, despite the Moscow films generally being much more "slapdash". But the director somehow managed to force everyone to use the style he liked. He also found an excellent new animator - Boris Dyozhkin, who had an excellent sense of rhythm and later became famous for directing sports cartoons.

The original 1924 poem is modified in the cartoon, with some bits added and others removed. Due to the nature of the poem, which uses wordplay and the sounds of the Russian language, it's rather hard to translate to English effectively. I partly used an earlier translation by William Jay Smith, but heavily revised it. Some parts now rhyme or sort-of rhyme, while other parts do not.


May 2 - Elephant and Pug / Слон и Моська (1941)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A fun, carefree film about a little dog that tries to intimidate an elephant, based on the parable by Krylov. It has no hint of the horrors of war to come, and was released before the Nazi invasion.

This was one of the earliest films I subtitled, way back in 2009. The original 1808 parable was translated in ~2001 by a Northwestern University project called "From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse", by Tatiana Tulchinsky, Andrew Wachtel, and Gwenan Wilbur (presumably only one of them translated this poem, but I don't know who). The dog's name, "Moska", is changed to simply "pug" in the English version.


May 3 - The Titmouse / Синица (1944)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English subtitles)

Another adaptation of a famous Chukovsky poem, this one is a collaboration between Aleksandr Ivanov (Moscow native, lover of political satire and the Disney style, and a studio rival of Ivan Ivanov-Vano) and Mstislav Pashchenko (another transplant from Leningrad who was one of the best directors of the time and very "exacting", like Tsehanovskiy). I'd say it's quite nice, but not among either director's best films.

I translated this in 2022, in full rhyme like the original. Partly based on a translation I found by Guy Daniels, but changed in places to be closer to the original text.

May 4 - The Eagle and the Mole / Орёл и Крот (1944)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

An adaptation of Krylov. Made by the same team who made "Elephant and Pug", it's structurally a decently-made film, though the visual style is pretty rough compared to some of the others (with a low frame rate sometimes), and the art direction is not very sophisticated - a 2nd rate Disney imitation, with spherical heads and big eyes for everyone. Also, the voice acting of the female Eagle seems like someone not used to voice acting. Unlike "Elephant and Pug", it's not actually a funny story and serves what would have been a timely warning at the time - do not let pride stop you from accepting good advice, no matter where it may come from.

I translated this in 2025. The translation matches both the rhymes and the meter of the original 1814 fable, and also sticks very close to the original meaning. It is partly made up of the best parts of earlier translations by Bernard Pares (1926), I. Henry Harrison (1883), C. Fillingham Coxwell (1920) and W.R.S. Ralston (1871). For more details and a transcription, see here and here.

May 5 - The Fir Tree / Ёлка (1942)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A Christmas/New Year film with a very holiday atmosphere... but it was actually made in the heat of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, since the studio had evacuated there due to the Battle of Moscow. A collaboration between Pyotr Nosov and Mihail Tsehanovskiy, who had recently managed to escape Leningrad. As can be seen in their later works, the two directors had rather different temperaments, with Nosov being more "slapdash" and Tsehanovskiy more "exacting", so the collaboration wasn't the most natural one. Probably it feels more like a Nosov film, and overall is charming and good, but not great.

I translated this in Dec 2023, with lyrics that match the rhymes, rhythms and meaning of the original Russian ones. First, I had to transcribe the Russian words, which was very hard as some of them are almost inaudible (e.g. the first line at 00:49). I was helped in this by Lemicnor, an older Russian gentleman who's probably transcribed hundreds of Russian animated films for me and others over more than a decade. I think he almost certainly guessed right.

May 6 - Fox, Hare and Rooster / Лиса, заяц и петух (1942)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A film by Olga Hodatayeva, and recognizably so. Her films always felt more grounded and creative than those of many others in Moscow. It's based on the Russian folk tale about a fox who steals the hare's house, who then tries to get other animals to help drive her out. It is well done but a bit humourless, and changes the original story just enough to somewhat undermine the moral (instead of "even the strong will not succeed if cowardly", it becomes "it's good to have friends"). I like Yuriy Norshteyn's 1973 adaptation of the same story a lot more, but this one is different enough that it could be a matter of taste.

Originally subtitled by Eus in 2015 with transcription from Lemicnor and Alevtina. I heavily revised the translation in 2024 and 2025 to be closer to the original text and make the rhymes better.


May 7 - One of Many / Одна из могих (1943)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English and Russian subtitles)

A little story in verse about a greedy, thoughtless woman who uses electricity without a thought and keeps the war factories from working well. One of only four cartoons released that year in the whole country. Obviously, it was a very "necessary" topic. Directed by Lamis Bredis. Not really that interesting from an artistic standpoint (I find the art design rather simplistic and ugly), though the poem is well-written.

I translated this in 2025, mostly without rhyming lyrics, but with the same number of syllables per line. The original poem was transcribed by me and Lemicnor (here).


May 8 - Journal of Political Satire No. 2 / Журнал Политсатиры №2 (1941)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English subtitles)

Made just after Hitler first invaded, it has rather crude and jingoistic animated caricatures that dehumanize and mock the enemy, while making superheroes of the Soviet soldiers. It seems to catch the point at which the propaganda was something like "those Germans are evil but we will beat them easily". As the full seriousness of the war became felt, this type of shallow satire must have stopped being received well by audiences, because no more films like it were made by the studio.

This cartoon was in the 1997 "Animated Soviet Propaganda" VHS/DVD set by Films By Jove. I made subtitles in 2022 based partly on that translation, but with changes and additions (I think some of it wasn't translated right, or not everything was translated? I can't really remember any more).

May 9 - Buzzy-Wuzzy Busy Fly / Муха-Цокотуха (1941)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English, Russian & Vietnamese subtitles)

Based again on a Chukovsky children's poem, it is also one of the best of the American-influenced cartoons of that era, with great animation, art design, pacing, humour and a lively jazz soundtrack. Unfortunately, it was finished a week before Germany invaded in June 1941, and was never shown in theatres. The original soundtrack was also lost, so a colour remake was made in 1960, but with different character design and various other changes. This restoration uses the 1960 soundtrack, which mostly works, except at 2:33 when the fly's voice suddenly goes down an octave for no reason. The original reportedly had a much more impressive drum solo during the climactic fight scene between the mosquito and the spider.

I first translated this in 2021, inspired by Anatoli Trojanowski's translation, then modified the subtitles in 2025 to use Dorian Rottenberg's translation of the fly's name instead ("Buzzy-Wuzzy Busy Fly", instead of my original choice "Chatty Fly").

May 10 - A Calm Forest Meadow / Тихая поляна (1946)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A dynamic, early film by the directing duo of Boris Dyozhkin and Gennadiy Filippov, who made films together until the latter's death in the early 1950s. Bears and hares play a fiercely-contested football (soccer) game, which ends in a tie with friendship the winner. The bears start off the film slow and sickly, but playing sports brings out their strength and vitality and completely changes their (ahem) bearing. At the end of the film, the ball is thrown at the viewer, as if to say "now it's your turn!"

This was the very first sports cartoon by Boris Dyozhkin, who later became rather famous for them. His genuine enthusiasm for sports always comes through in his art; although other Soviet animation directors also made films about sports, it's fair to say that only Dyozhkin loved the topic above all else.

The film is notable for including a very "realistic" sports commentary over the entire match which was quite difficult to translate. :) I transcribed first the Russian with Lemicnor's help, then translated it to English line-by-line with lots of Googling along the way. Unfortunately, neither I not Lemicnor are very familiar the sporting lingo. If you think something could be done better, please let me know!


May 11 - The Song of Joy / Песенка радости (1946)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A very sweet film about a little girl and her forest animal friends who together help put an end to the overly-long winter and bring forth the spring. Pashchenko had started this film in pre-war Leningrad, but had to abandon it, and only finished it years later in Moscow with a very different team. The animation style ended up being quite different from what it was with his old team in Leningrad - unlike Tsehanovskiy, who managed to keep the same style in "Telephone" two years earlier (see above). This film was one of the favourites of the early post-war years - Ivan Ivanov-Vano wrote in his 1980 book (p.133) about how it became a "tuning fork" for many of the other directors at the time, who suddenly realized that they didn't have to look to Disney for inspiration. Although personally, I think it feels a little uneven - I prefer both Pashchenko's earlier 1938 "Jabzha" and his later films of the 1950s. Anyways, this restoration is definitely an improvement on what was available previously, but I'm not sure whether it looks quite right. The lines seem little bit out of focus, and I don't know whether the colour balance is the intended one - it seems like the shadows may have been brightened too much. On the other hand, Soyuzmultfilm has actually uploaded this restoration in the correct theatrical frame rate of 24fps (all the previous ones had been in the historically incorrect PAL TV frame rate of 25fps)!

First translated by Eus in 2012-2014, edited/corrected by me in 2021 and 2023. The songs are translated, without rhyming, but with an attempt to keep the same number of syllables.


May 12 - Little Gray Neck / Серая шейка (1948)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English, Russian, Estonian & Chinese subtitles)

This is another beloved late-1940s classic made by the excellent directing duo of Leonid Amalrik and Vladimir Polkovnikov, who made many excellent animated films together from the late 1930s to the early 1950s (after which, they split up). It is about a little duck who has to survive the winter after her wing gets damaged by a fox. The story was written by Dmitriy Mamin-Sibiryak in 1891, one of many naturalistic stories about animals that he wrote (in the original, the duck does not talk, among many other changes). This one was a big international success as well, winning top awards at three film festivals, and even having an American dub made in the 1950s. However, it seems to have been somewhat forgotten since then outside of Russia. Unlike most of the other films on this list, this one had already been restored back in 2019, and I think the colours in the earlier restoration are actually better - in the new one, they're brighter but at the cost of lighter shadows and lower contrast. Hence, the first video in the link above is of the older 2019 restoration.

The original subtitles from 2012 (either made or found by Eus) were corrected by myself in Apr 2022 on the basis of the 1950s English dub in the film (which was actually fairly competently done). The creator of that 1950s translation is unknown - perhaps someone at Macmillan Films, or else Official Films (the earliest mention of the dub of this film seems to come from January 1951). The 1950s version wasn't used when it disagreed too strongly with the Russian version, with one exception: line 71 - "He's hard of hearing. He makes you repeat things a dozen times." In Russian, the final sentence is "that's why we call him gluhar'". Gluhar' is the Russian word for "wood grouse", and it has the same root as the Russian word for "deaf". There didn't seem any way to smoothly translate the original "pun" into English, so the 1950s version was kept; something entirely different that still fits the template of "mildly amusing comment made by the bunny".


May 14 - The Flower with Seven Colours / Цветик-семицветик (1948)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English, Russian, Estonian & French subtitles)

The tale of a little girl that is given a magic flower that grants her seven wishes. A very sweet cartoon that is very well-done technically. I may be mistaken, but as far as I can tell, this was the first Soviet cartoon to almost entirely use rotoscoping (tracing footage of live actors in animation), which soon became so popular that it was used for practically all humans (and many animals) that appeared in Soviet animation in the early 1950s, before just as suddenly completely falling out of fashion a few years later. Tsehanovskiy was considered the top proponent of rotoscoping, but I wonder if the idea was truly his. His earlier films from the 1920s and 1930s were as far from "realism" as you can get. Isn't it strange that he would embrace the complete opposite of who he was as an artist later in life? Probably the reason was something like this: his 1930s Balda animated feature suffered a catastrophic fate - delayed, defunded, suppressed and then destroyed by German bombing. The early 1940s saw him choosing extremely "safe" scripts to adapt (aimed at the youngest children) that nobody could have any possible objection to, as well as toning down his visual style considerably compared to his work in the 1920s and 1930s (see the films above). With rotoscoping, he finally found a way to avoid having any potentially objectionable "style" in his animated films at all - the official Stalin-approved art style was "socialist realism", and using rotoscoping made his animation as "real" as it was possible for it to be. Now, that was never officially the rationale that was given - according an oral presentation given by director Ivanov-Vano in 1951, it was something about how it would improve the skill of the animators, and eventually would no longer be necessary. Tsehanovskiy was smart enough to find a less embarrassing reason, maybe even smart enough to convince himself of it. But it may not be a coincidence that Viktor Gromov, the Party's main man at the studio who came from a non-animation background, is credited as "supervising director" on this film, and rotoscoping began to lose popularity rapidly after he left the studio. As for Tsehanovskiy, he kept making good films but never again did anything uniquely stylish for the rest of his life. Either he lost the knack, or he stopped trusting himself in art direction, because it sure seems like he consistently chose whatever he perceived the "average" style of his peers was.
Anyway, I've digressed rather a lot. This film really is quite well-made. It even won a "Best Children's Film" award in Czechoslovakia. Another excellent adaptation of this tale was made by Roman Kachanov, director of "Cheburashka" and "Secret of the Third Planet": The Last Petal (1977). Unlike this one, it stays true to the ending of the original story and the girl does not get an extra magical flower at the end.

Originally translated by "Svetlana 7733" in Aug 2012, with subs created by Eus. I revised the translation in May 2025. Much of the original Russian script is in verse, but that's not true of the English translation except for the little poem said to grant a wish (I had translated it in 2022 while translating the 1977 film).


May 16 - Fedya Zaytsev / Федя Зайцев (1948)



Watch on: Animatsiya.net (with English & Russian subtitles)

A third grader named Fedya Zaytsev arrives on the first day of school before anyone else, and draws a little man on the freshly-painted wall of his classroom. Later, he's afraid to own up to it and lets his friend take the blame. When the boy returns home, he falls asleep and has a dream in which all of his toys and favourite book heroes leave him. Finally, the little man on the wall of the classroom comes to life, and rushes to find Fedya and convince him to own up to what he did.
Directed by the Brumberg sisters (Valentina and Zinaida), this cartoon was beloved by the public, by critics (then and now) and by other directors. The little man drawn on the wall even became part of the studio's logo for a number of years.
Personally, I think the concept is great, but the execution is a bit plodding, what with all the very formal and polite dialogue (especially by the little man).

The people in the film are all traced from live-action (rotoscoped). Rotoscoping had been used sporadically in Soviet animation since the 1930s (e.g. the dance scenes in the 1934 Fusspot in Africa, or the 1938 Jabzha), but it slowly became more prominent. In 1943, actors were invited to the Soyuzmultfilm studio for the first time for an animated film (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, also by the Brumberg sisters), but that film also had plenty of non-rotoscoped animation set in the "real world", as did the studio's subsequent films... until 1948. "Fedya Zaytsev" is one of the two films from 1948 that seem to lie at the beginning of the rotoscoping-only trend (tracing just about everything from live action footage, not just certain scenes), the other being "The Flower with Seven Colours", which technically looks much neater. But "Fedya Zaytsev" also gets credit for being the first rebellion against rotoscoping (e.g. in the documentary The Brumberg Sisters Against the Background of Their Time), since some of its major characters (in the boy's dream) are children's drawings that anticipate the move away from realism in the mid-1950s. The Brumberg sisters were enthusiastic participants in that movement, and their later film Big Troubles (1961) is drawn entirely in that style. It also looks a lot like a certain famous Soviet cartoon from around when they first began their artistic education in VHUTEMAS in the 1920s - Skating Rink (1927).

Originally, the story was to be in two parts, but the script for the second part never got approved. In 1960, the Brumbergs decided to remake it as a feature film, with the second part now added back in, and the art style changed to be less realistic (personally, I prefer the 1948 look). Also, their 1955 film Island of Mistakes was initially supposed to star Fedya Zaytsev again. In the end, it stars a boy who looks and acts like him, but has a different name.

A restoration was first posted online by Gosfilmofond in Dec. 2023. The video posted by Soyuzmultfilm to their channel in May 2025 is based on that earlier restoration, but with the colours made brighter and the texture made smoother with DNR. Just like with "Little Gray Neck", I prefer the earlier restoration.

English subtitles were originally made by Eus in 2015 (probably transcribed from an earlier video hard-subbed by Zhurka75). I revised the translation heavily in Sept 2025, changing almost every line, and timed it to the 2025 restoration. About half of the original dialogue was in rhyme, some of it sung. The songs mostly don't rhyme in the translation, but I did make an attempt to keep the number of syllables the same. A particular difficulty was the painters' song at the beginning, as they sing about wall painting methods that are no longer used much even in Russia (in particular: priming the wall with vitriol to clean off any mold, and applying glue to it).

Conclusion

This is a pretty good selection of films that gives a good overview of the state of Soviet animation just before, during, and after WW2. Soyuzmultfilm, based in Moscow, was certainly the centre of that world, although there were also some interesting things being made in Leningrad (but not for long...) and in Georgia. Some of my favourites of the period are not here - particularly The Stolen Sun (1943), The Lost Letter (1945), Winter Tale (1945). The recently-restored colour version of The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1943) was also not here. I hope we get to see it one day! Some historically important pre-war works are also worth watching, such as Ivas (1940, about the Poles).

A number of these films had subtitles made earlier by Eus, an incredibly prolific subtitler of Soviet animation who's been at it almost as long as I have. However, he's not so fluent in either English or Russian, so I find his work usually needs some (or a lot of) revision. Even so, I certainly didn't expect to take until December 2025 to finish translating all of these!

UPDATE 2 (Jan 29): FTP access is also back. Everything seems to be working now.
UPDATE (Jan 29): It is currently back online, and I've made an up-to-date database backup. However, I still can't connect through FTP, so I won't start adding new material just yet.

The website has been offline since Jan. 23 or 24.
I don't know when it will be back; the status page I've been told to look at is this one: https://status.quadranet.com/
As far as I can tell, it is down because of the Los Angeles fires, though they won't directly admit that, only claiming "maintenance". The most recent update is more ominous: "We are working 24/7 to resolve this, but as expected this is not enough to resolve all."

If worse comes to worst, I'll have to change hosts. My last full site backup is from Dec. 30, so I'll have to reupload anything added after that.

Sorry about the downtime. If anyone is looking for any resource that used to be on the site, please leave a comment here or message me.

The most recent backup of the site from the Wayback Machine is Jan 17, but it seems that they never made backups of the subtitle files.

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).