Unexplained Fear – Review of the cartoon horror “The Bear is a Fake Foot” (1990) Horror fantasy based on the Russian folk tale.
Pagan fear, how much do we know about it? What lies behind the dark edges of seemingly familiar, and seemingly traditional, our folk tales? Fear creeping out of the darkness of time and taking a dead man by the throat with cold fingers. Fear, when the characters of this story appear (specifically, the bear), does not seem to represent evil forces. But there is a reading in context with another force, mysterious and inexplicable, a force of nature known to have no particular face. The authors of this cartoon knew something about it exactly, encoding their message in the form of the strangest and most terrible cartoon of the era of perestroika.
Zoohoror in the Soviet Union, in fact, was provided in the cinema only with the film “The Evil Spirit of Yambuya” (1977), about a man-eating bear, and later two more cartoon horrors were filmed, and, interestingly, both about bears. We have already written about Bear, but the cartoon “The Bear is a Fake Foot” of 1990 I discovered for myself only recently, I watched and was shocked. In 1990, the genre of Soviet horror was just emerging, but in the animation decided not to wait, and already actively introduced the techniques of horror.
I knew a more traditional and kind version of this fairy tale “The Bear is a Fake Foot” (1984), where the hapless bear falls into the hive with his paw and cannot get rid of him. Sincere and kind drawing, in contrast to the version of 1990, which, according to the reviews of those who remember it, all unequivocally called horror. This is facilitated by the more than strange and frightening visual side in the style of a shadow puppet. The cartoon is clearly not childish, because here everything is collected that can scare and shock the viewer; murky, with interspersed white background, even more increasing the nightmare of the image, empty eyes of all the characters, glowing with bad light, strange clock with a cuckoo, which when approaching the bear to the house of an elderly couple begin to warn. Sound accompaniment instead of the usual music consists of creaks and rustles, and what is surprising, suspense goes upside down in anticipation of something irreversible, terrible than the one-legged bear that broke into the old man's house.
By the collapse of the Soviet Union, the animation of the agonizing country was marked by a number of shocking works, mainly for adults, terrible images and allegories became the norm in animation for adults, but even not only for adults. Apparently, this was a peculiar reflection of all the bad processes taking place in the country. Film directors also tried themselves in a new genre, but much less. Animation as a genre of art to the metamorphoses of horror or fiction is more plastic, and the more terrible such images sound in it.
Returning to our animated film, no criticism will say unequivocally - how, in what context can one read the image of a bear here? A totem animal? A god who has taken on such a form? Obviously another, before us a kind of proto-pagan interpretation of a seemingly famous fairy tale. Something very ancient and creepy carries from the screen from such an interpretation. Here it seems that there are no positive characters, the old man and the old woman seem to lull a screaming child, but for some reason this also blows an inexplicable horror, at least the kinship between them is not read. Breaking into the house of old people bear, contrary to expectations, no one eats, and generally immediately rushes to lull the child, as if specially appeared to his crying, from somewhere in the dark depths of pagan wilds.
Absolutely strange, creepy, not amenable to any laws of logic cartoon, as well as many other similar animation of that difficult time. But is it not valuable to us today that the new Russian horror was developed not only in cinema, but also in animation? Valuable, very valuable. In fact, we have two parallel directions, and we can compare how it developed both here and there.