Frank, beautiful and a little funny story The myth of Polyphemus, Akida and Galatea is not as popular as Homer’s Odyssey, but since I was interested in mythical monsters since childhood, this story did not escape me, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in 1995 there was a film adaptation, and even from Soyuzmultfilm.
Greek myths received cartoon incarnations before, but the further, the more explicit their content became, according to the original sources. There is no doubt that this is one of the most sensual projects from Soyuzmultfilm. The number of naked bodies in the frame is so large that there are only two scenes in which two characters wear pieces of fabric. This is Akid and, oddly enough, Aphrodite – the goddess, who is most often depicted without clothes, but here to emphasize her divinity she reveals a wide robe. The lack of clothing in the vast majority of scenes is significantly compared with the diversity of landscapes – these are the coast, and the seabed, and forests, and mountains. Despite the fact that the cartoon has enough bold angles and even there are two scenes with copulation, it can not be called vulgar. All the characters, not excluding satyrs and Polyphemus, turned out to be beautiful and – to varying degrees – well-groomed.
There are a lot of funny scenes in the movie. Despite the fact that the original humor was not so much, it is quite appropriate here. Jokes are associated not only with the clumsy and rude Polyphemus, but also with Erot - the little son of Aphrodite, who, like all children, is very fond of gifts. Or gifts like God. To be honest, I have never seen a single adaptation of myths in which Aphrodite and Eros would appear before us in such a simple, but at the same time sublime form. The artists and the director managed to convey exactly those moods that imbued the tales of antiquity, and this is amazing. I am glad that the ending of the cartoon is happy, even a little cunning in relation to the main villain.
If anything turned out to be unsuccessful here, it is a style of animation that seems to hang in places. Paying a lot of attention to drawing the bodies of characters, the artists probably simply did not have the strength and patience to please us with the standard twenty-four frames per second. Well, the picture looks a little faded, which is also disappointing. And so the cartoon was beautiful and quite funny.
8 out of 10