Not the New Year, but a shame. That's crazy. Next year we will do that! Yes, yes!
© Warning from Masha
First of all, I like the series “Masha and the Bear”. It is fun, with good morals and quality (especially for Russia) animation. And all the more my frustration with the holiday special, which had every chance of becoming an outstanding success, but instead it was an outstanding failure. Well done artists who painted amazing winter landscapes. To all those who are in charge of the visual, I can commend. I can’t say the same about the writers.
But I'll start from afar. "Twelve months." A fairy tale on definitely New Year's, not Christmas theme. New Year is not about hanging socks over the fireplace while waiting for gifts from Santa Claus, but about the junction of December and January. No one celebrates Christmas anywhere on December 31, it has different dates depending on the region. In the same cartoon, everything is mixed: Christmas tree, fireplace, Santa Claus cap, twelve months, talk about all year round and "Monsters Corporation". Wait, what? Yes, there is a "fuzzy" reference to the Monsters Corporation. It does not affect the plot, but in itself adds strangeness, which here and without it is enough.
Who do you expect to see in a movie with that name? An experienced team of twelve keepers? You can forget and not remember. Not only have some months been turned into almost infants, but also some of them have changed their sex! If you do not like today’s Hollywood craving for racial and gender diversity, then prepare to gloat or, conversely, be angry, because now Russian cartoons have confidently caught up with Hollywood. Is that what everyone wanted? And the most absurd thing is that the voiceover at the beginning tells about the months as if they were all men. Are the actors not coordinated?
There would have been no nagging if, instead of the New Year and twelve months, the plot had been Christmas and Santa Claus with elves and elves. I would really look at elves and elves, especially since there are almost no such characters in Russian projects.
And the final blow: a lousy script. Characters are so blind to the events around them, as if someone deliberately turns off their brain at key moments. It is impossible that the ubiquitous Masha did not notice the blue sleigh on the glade, and even more so it is impossible that the “months” (without quotation marks they cannot be mentioned here at all) did not notice the loss of the rod, on which the balance of the elements depends. I don’t remember that kind of distraction anywhere. This is really a shame for the writers, who, as they say, pulled the owl on the globe. But the action came. Action is more important than logic, right?
It’s a shame that there are funny moments with Bear, who, as always, amuses us with his reactions to chaos and destruction. Clubfoot pleases, like other characters-animals, but alas – to increase this failure assessment they can not.
3 out of 10