Two rabbits. Oh, the mountains in Africa are so high! Oh, the rivers in Africa are this wide! But according to Ian Larry, in order to see unprecedented miracles, it is not necessary to go to distant countries and conquer new continents, just use the invention of Professor Ivan Germogenovich Enotov. A sip of fragrant soda that tastes like lemonade, and now you're the size of a flea, and you can ride a dragonfly, or you can hunt ants, or... Or be eaten by some spider, or even a harmless grasshopper. Yes, in the world of insects, you can not yawn - in a moment you will get someone on a tooth.
Oh, these writers are enough just one of their whims, and the character instantly changes size, shape, or even appearance as a whole. However, Larry was one of the first to use this method to immerse the characters not in a fictional fairy-tale world, but in the world that is very real, the one we encounter every day, convincing young readers that miracles are very close, you just need to reach out, and in order to discover something unprecedented and interesting, you just need to change the angle of view. It is not surprising that the story about the adventures in the country of dense grasses, became popular and the book was repeatedly reprinted, and it is all the more natural that the film adaptation of the work was delayed for half a century - to embody on the screen all the variety of fauna representatives encountered by the heroes during their journey, it was seen as a task far from simple.
Valery Rodchenko had everything at his disposal to create a good film adaptation of the story of Karik and Vali: an excellent cast capable of decorating any film, technical capabilities for macro shooting insects, an excellent literary source. And it cannot be said that he did not use these opportunities - even now episodes of interaction of diminished characters with huge spiders and bears look quite convincing, and close-ups of various beetles and caterpillars cause associations with the characters of horror films and meet them in a dark alley desire does not arise. The voice of Vasily Livanov, who plays the role of a professor of entomology, is not coincidentally full of the familiar from childhood intonations of Nikolai Nikolaevich Drozdov, and the master of the comic episode Mikhail Svetin and Olga Volkova create on the screen a wonderful story of a suddenly flashed bright feeling.
However, excessive obsession with details to the detriment of the main idea of the film played a cruel joke with the director, depriving the tape of internal balance. The development of the line of relationships of the characters of the second plan and sometimes too detailed demonstration of the capabilities of macro lenses eat up a fair share of the overall timekeeping of the picture, turning the story of adventures in the microcosm into a story about the ability of the valiant Soviet police to find missing children. Although, perhaps, this is for the best, because the magnificent play of adult actors is compensated by the miscast of the main actors. Alas, Rodchenko is far from Nechaev, and not even Grachevsky, so Karika and Valya are played by pretty children, but deprived not only of acting talent, but also of any charm, and the diligence with which they perform the director's commands only emphasizes the inexpressiveness and falsity of the resulting characters.
Having seasoned the resulting vinaigrette with calls to protect nature in combination with frank fairy tales like humanizing a beetle, Rodchenko finally changed the vector of the film, transforming the real world into a deliberately fantastic one. And now there is nothing surprising in the fact that after the meeting of the main characters with the diminished professor, all predatory insects disappear as if by a magic wand, and the road home becomes safe and pleasant. It's a fairy tale, buddy, there's no other way. Therefore, the unpopularity of the resulting mixture of documentary films about the life of arthropods with a moralizing children's picture is quite natural: as they say, one blade of grass is not yet a forest, one idea is not yet a film.