Converted mythology - a review of the cartoon horror "Kele" (1988) By the end of the eighties, experiments in Soviet animation became more sophisticated and more frightening in meaning. Maybe it was the situation in the country, who knows? For the directors of this cartoon, this short film, which is seven minutes long, was the debut and, unfortunately, the brightest in the entire subsequent career. This cartoon is drawn in the simplest manner, this is probably how any child draws his first awareness of life. And the mysterious blot-like demon Kele, and two Yakut girls, and the world around them, are deliberately painted so that the viewer has a resemblance to the originality, to the primordiality of our world. He seems to be still being drawn, created, invented by an invisible creator. Everything in it is shaky, unstable, clumsy, nothing can be predicted. And the strange Kele is not at all good or evil, he is just some mysterious creator, most likely part of the unknown, which is always behind the screen. He is his instrument, as is indicated by the musical instrument he plays before meeting the girls. In the Yakut fairy tale, by the way, with which I specifically got acquainted, where everything is much easier. But the Soviet animators did not like this “easier”. Soviet creative consciousness gave birth to masterpieces. For example, Kele told me more about the nature of that primitive fear than all Hollywood horror films combined.
Moreover, in the cartoon so clearly sounds deliberately woven erotic motif that you wonder! It was still Soviet, despite the restructuring. No, in the Yakutian fairy tale there was definitely nothing like this, here Kele is presented almost as the first maniac in the universe. Yes, the natural chaste mythology of the Yakut epic, where Kele is only a part of nature, the spirit of the forests, abducting children to have fun and let go in the film adaptation, received a completely different psychological coloring. Moreover, if you look deeper into the meaning of the cartoon, the abyss opens, and behind it another, and another. In the soul of the unhappy Kele, about which the authors of the film wanted to tell us, two natures clashed - Christian and Pagan. Being the conductor of God’s will, Kele transformed the world through music and was an organic part of it. But faced with the world of people, moreover with its female part, Kele rebelled against the will of the Supreme and lost part of his divine nature, transformed into a pagan demon of lust. It is in these allusions that the entire Soviet animation is taken; to take a completely Christian meaning and retell it in an angular form of peripheral, very little known Yakut mythology. Ask me why. I think, despite the perestroika, the authors were still afraid to speak openly about Christian values. Mythology turned inside out is a favorite technique of Soviet animators, but we will talk about it more than once on the pages of Kinopoisk.