For those who go to bed, sleep well. Somehow, in the last few years, there has been an increasing realization that a significant part of Soviet animation, without which, my dear reader and I, in our distant childhood, could not think about immersion in a healthy serene sleep, carries a certain hidden message and mysterious meaning.
Perhaps, after such an intricate phrase, with which I want to begin my review today, most viewers will see fragments of the great Norstein creation “Hedgehog in the Fog”. I can not agree with this audience, because this cartoon is the best example of this.
But... Along with a small hedgehog lost in the fog; a boy (in his pajamas, though not striped) wandering with a black and white cat crashed into memory. In such a duet, they sing strange songs that interfere with the sleep of neighbors of all kinds of suits and shades, representing such a monotonous “gray” society, but about this a little later.
Perhaps it will be appropriate to mention all the colorfulness of what is happening, for on the one hand before us is nothing but an ode to childhood, where the boundaries between the real world and fantasy, the best environment for which is a dream, are so often erased. And so it is no coincidence that the completely realistic Soviet cuisine, which fully conveys the essence of life of those times, is filled with surreal images with easy cat feed. These images have the same color of the era, which creates an incredible integrity of the overall picture.
Although, revising the robot Natalia Marchenkova many years later, the imagination excites quite different things. There is a creative process, represented by verses, as a path to the knowledge of Being itself; there are neighbors (the model of working-class Soviet society), as a symbol of the collective unconscious, eager to sleep and unwilling to know the essence of things. There is a domestic cat, ready to show the other side of life, and to lead young emerging creatures to the truth, the only way to which is the process of creativity. There is a doctor, a small detail in the image of which, namely leather bracelets (I am sure, not a random element), gives him a similarity with the singers of freedom, representing rock movements. Which, by the way, during the release of the cartoon on the screens, gained significant momentum. And it is certainly not by chance that this doctor diagnoses a serious illness to all those who are disturbed by poetry to sleep.
Perhaps all of the above is just a focus on unconscious motives (for very often the meaning of the work is revealed even to the authors themselves only after their implementation). Perhaps an allegorical way through a children's cartoon in the land of censorship to announce the coming changes. But, along with incredible songs that reveal the very essence of the characters, notes of humor and unusual graphics, we have a very worthy cartoon, which even years later causes emotions, shrouding in a slight sense of nostalgia.
"I waited for this time, and this time has come - those who were silent, ceased to be silent." ©
10 out of 10