The 90s of the twentieth century, freedom of speech and self-expression came to Russia, the fashion for frankness in clothes and behavior. Towards new times, new films have appeared, among them Daphne. The name of the director is Petrov, a landmark for the Russian animation, but sometimes it is not immediately clear which of the two directors we are talking about. Alexander, who directed “My Love”, “The Old Man and the Sea”, worked in the technique of “revived painting”. Another Petrov - Anatoly - made no less contribution: he created more than seventy cartoons, choosing a rare style of animation in three-dimensional space. Among them are the most famous redhead, and Boniface, and Cockroach, and Bremen musicians... He worked for children, but at the end of his career, after the changes in the country, he came to adult themes, creating a cycle of five stories.
First came "The Birth of Erot." Daphne looks like a sequel, although this is not a second series, but a separate cartoon. Aphrodite raised her son, Eros, against the will of the gods, and is now ready to take revenge on them with his hands. She brought a bow and arrows, taught them to use them, and those arrows are not simple, they do not kill, but amaze with love. Preparing for revenge, the mother and son saw Apollo fighting a snake. God defeated Gadin, but the arrow of the baby could not dodge and fell in love with the first girl he met, Daphne. At first, she listened favorably to the story of what had happened to him, about his feelings, but Erot's arrow struck her, another arrow that kills love. And now Daphne protests, breaks out, runs away, calls for help. But is it possible to escape from this force without resorting to transformations?
This cycle is not in vain called Greek, because it is filmed according to myth, and even the credits are stylized, but Daphne is not just a translation of a short story by means of animation, the director deepened and supplemented the original, added episodes of the conversation of Daphne and Apollo, the refusal of the lover to get rid of this sweet flour, the very motive of Aphrodite’s revenge.
The cartoon does not leave the audience indifferent, although it looks somewhat unfinished, prevents the frame from stopping, as if the show hangs, despite the fact that the voices of the characters sound, lead the story further. The squeaky voice of the boy cuts his ears, and Aphrodite’s voice is knocked out of the general style, resembling the rudeness of a market trader. And the fact that the memory of the beloved will be fixed in the laurel wreath is not very clear from the film. But it's all done incredibly convincingly: bodies and faces as if alive - everything breathes, moves, curves, muscles, facial expressions, and passion, and anger, and disgust. The anatomical accuracy of the images of bodies, the escape of Daphne, shown very vividly, her rebirth - it is clear why this cartoon is remembered for so many years.
Now it is difficult to feel how these candid shots looked then, at the dawn of the 90s, because today you will not surprise anyone with naked nature. Soviet films with their pathos, puritanism, the priority of the collective over the personal, in which love was talked carefully, hints and most often in a production setting, replaced a frank story about the feelings, hidden desires of an individual. Now we can say that these freedoms went from extreme to extreme, vulgarity in the cinema overflows, but then it was a breakthrough, a landmark stage in the development of our society and cinema.