A masterpiece of Soviet experimental animation I saw this sad movie when I was 7 years old. He made a great impression on me, but its true meaning I understood only many years later.
At the beginning of the cartoon we see a violin with the face of a woman is a soul striving for high impulses, chased by a creature with four entities is a devil. The action then moves to the train, where in the compartment of the last carriage sits a one-armed paratrooper returning from the Afghan war. The soul in the form of a violin came to him, after which he plunges into thinking that his life would have been completely different if it had not been for the war. Suddenly, these bright thoughts are crumbling, and before the main character appears a messenger of Satan, who feeds on human suffering. He offers to play cards with the soldier, promising how to exchange his soul for a prosthetic hand. The soldier agrees and loses his soul, after which the devil takes his soul to Hell, where he mocks it, and in exchange for it, transfers his hand to the paratrooper, but this gift did not bring joy to the soldier. Upon returning to his native places, without reaching home, he goes mad and dies. But his soul ascended to heaven.
The cartoon turned out just perfect. Everything the author wanted to say fit into a 10-minute timeline. I will note the peculiar black-and-white range of colors, an interesting manner of drawing, which has always stood out the director of the film Vladimir Zuykov (they, in the same manner, were painted and the famous film adaptation of V. Gauf’s fairy tale “Caliph-Aist”). Special praise deserves the composer Vyacheslav Artemov, who wrote a stunningly sad, tragic and beautiful soundtrack to the cartoon. The idea of the film is also interesting. The cartoon appeared at a time when a great power was beginning to collapse, and then the collapse of the socialist camp, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall. At this moment, this 10-minute masterpiece expressed the idea of the opposition of the soul and body, mechanics and nature, expressing the whole range of problems, which then accumulated, became a kind of cry of the soul. So to this problem, in the USSR at that time probably no one has addressed. A special piquancy to the film gives the fact that it was shot at a time when the economy was collapsing in the country, but temples were actively arguing.
Masterpiece verdict for all time.