Soviet dreams of the future

Remember the charming cat that sneezed in the screensaver of the Soviet cartoon? We remember and found it - along with a pile of other hand-drawn fiction. As a child, she frightened and discouraged, as she raised serious, adult topics. It is time to revise the old cartoons to find out what the future dreamed of in that country.

1977: Polygon

Animator Anatoly Petrov had a hand in many famous Soviet cartoons, from "Bremen Town Musicians" to "Vacation Boniface". His independent work was much more interesting: he painted realistic three-dimensional graphics. The most famous example of Petrov’s style was the short cartoon “Polygon” based on the anti-war story of the science fiction writer North Gansovsky.


The plot is simple: the nameless inventor came up with an invulnerable tank that reads the thoughts of the enemy. Field tests of perfect weapons take place on a tropical island - apparently, this is a reference to the atolls of Bikini and Eniwetok. The military commission includes a general, under whose command the son of the hero was killed. The tank destroys the military, and then its avenged creator.



To create the effect of volume, the characters were painted on two layers of celluloid, and one was shot out of focus. In tense moments, the blurry image takes on sharpness. The camera moves all the time, freezing only for a short while. There is no blood in the frame, and the only musical accompaniment consists of the famous song “Tanha Shodam” by Ahmad Zahir. All this together conveys feelings of anxiety, fear and longing - the feelings of the era when the Doomsday Clock showed 9 minutes before midnight. By the way, in 2018 the arrow was moved to 23:58 - so the prediction came true?

1978: Contact

In 1968, the Canadian animator George Dunning shot the famous Yellow Submarine. In the Soviet Union, the cartoon only got in the 80s on pirate cassettes. However, back in 1978, director and artist Vladimir Tarasov shot his own vivid musical phantasmagoria. Short, but in the main character John Lennon is definitely guessed. This is a merit of the artist Nikolai Koshkin, who "quoted" the musical western cartoon.


Soviet "Lennon" - an artist who got out on the open air. In nature, he meets an alien, also a kind of artist. A shapeless creature transforms into seen objects. At first the person is frightened, but then he teaches the guest to whistle the melody “Speak Softly Love” from “The Godfather”. Unlike his distant relatives from Annihilation, an alien makes friends with a man and goes with him into the sunset.



Lifehack: turn off the original “Contact” soundtrack and turn on Lucy in the sky with diamonds. You will notice that the cartoon footage almost perfectly hits the music.

1980: The Return

“Return” is another Tarasov cartoon. It describes everyday events by the standards of science fiction: the Valdai T-614 spacecraft fell into a meteor shower and received damage, due to which it can only be landed on Earth in manual mode. The pilot is advised to get enough sleep before boarding. He plunges into a deep sleep, attempts to wake him fail. However, when the ship's course passes over the native house in the village, the astronaut somehow senses this, wakes up and lands the ship.



It is not clear whether the hero’s unconsciousness threatened catastrophe. Music (Gustav Mahler's 5th symphony) eloquently indicates that the situation is alarming. The authors were advised by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, so the film accurately reflects the technical side of flights. At the same time, realism and routine is shattered by flashy references to Alien, which came out just a year before. The space truck from the inside resembles a Gigerian alien ship, and the pilot himself looks little like a man. A short cartoon scares no less than a classic scene with a face capture.

1981: Space Aliens

The famous science fiction brothers, the Strugatsky brothers, wrote several scripts for cartoons, but Soviet censorship “cut” them all. All but one, which Arkady Strugatsky wrote with a friend, writer and translator Marian Tkachev. This was the script for the first series of Space Aliens.



Footage promising: an alien ship descends to Earth, aliens send out black robotic probes. A group of scientists is trying to figure out what space guests want. Then it turns out that they want to share technology. Have you ordered an “arrival”?


Drawn in an avant-garde constructivist manner, this cartoon lasts a little over fifteen minutes. It seems to be much longer, because the pace of events on the screen is uneven and slow. The lethargic calm with which the actors voice overly long phrases underscore this characteristic feature of Aliens.


“Experimental” philosophical parables were one of the favorite genres of Soviet animators. Nevertheless, the “Aliens” cross the line between “it is deep” and “it is boring”. It seems that Strugatsky himself understood this, so the second series was shot without him. In it, aliens experience the moral stamina of people. People stand the test, and everything seems to end well. And well, that ends.

1984: “It will be gentle rain”

In 1950, American writer Ray Bradbury wrote one of the most famous post-apocalyptic stories in the history of the genre. “It will be gentle rain” talks about how the robotic “smart home” continues to work after the explosion of an atomic bomb. After 34 years, Uzbekfilm shot a short, emotional cartoon based on the story.


Bradbury's text is conveyed only with some creative liberties. For example, in the story after the disaster, some time has passed - days or a month. In the cartoon, the robot, who does not understand what happened, shakes out the ashes of the hosts, ashes on the eve, from their beds. Then a bird flies into the house, the robot chases after it and accidentally destroys the house.



This film adaptation won the prizes of three international festivals and one all-Union. The director and scriptwriter of the cartoon was the actor and director Nazim Tulyakhodzhaev from Tashkent. By the way, his work with Bradbury’s material didn’t end there: three years later he made a film based on the Veld story. Of the two adaptations, the audience remembered precisely “It will be gentle rain”, because the horror of the global war is difficult to interrupt or dispel.

1985: The Contract

Soviet animators loved to film the works of foreign science fiction writers. As a result, bright projects appeared, real fruits of love. Such as the cartoon "Contract" based on the eponymous story by Robert Silverberg. Bright, avant-garde style, so beloved by director Tarasov, resembles pop art. Musical accompaniment - excerpts from the jazz composition I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby performed by Ella Fitzgerald.


Both the original and the cartoon begin the same way: the colonist fights off monsters on an uninhabited planet. A robot salesman comes to his aid, who, it turns out, released these monsters to force a person to buy his goods. The colonist contacts the company that sent him to the planet and finds out that under the terms of the contract he cannot trade with the robot. In addition, for the shipment of everyday things like razors, three skins will be torn from him, since they are only required to supply him with necessities of life.



Then the plot of the original and the film adaptation diverge. In the story, the robot threatens to shoot the colonist. The colonist is witty out of the situation, demanding money from the company to save his life, and after refusing to break the contract and declare his planet as a pioneer. Even the ironic endorsement of capitalist practices was taboo for the Union. Therefore, in the cartoon, the colonist and robot companies unleash a war. The robot sacrifices itself to warm a person under unexpected snowfall. Despite the obvious ideological message, the cartoon leaves a good impression.

1985-1995: The Fantadrome

Children's animated series Fantadroms looks like it was drawn by Western animators. In fact, the first three episodes were released by Telefilm Riga, and then ten more were released at the Latvian studio Dauka.


The main character of Fantadrom is the robot cat Indrix XIII, who knows how to change shape. It is he who sneezes at the beginning and at the end of each series. Together with his friends, a space cat rescues aliens and people from unpleasant situations like fires, misunderstanding, or a sudden lack of salt in breakfast. The stories of the Fantadrom are revealed without words, only with images, music and sounds, as in the Disney Fantasy.


The first three “Soviet” series look serious: they focus on spaceships and the metropolis where Indrix lives. The new ten episodes are focused on children, so the focus has shifted to what is called a slapstick comedy. If the studios had more resources and opportunities, it is easy to imagine that Fantadroms could become a kind of space "Tom and Jerry." Unfortunately, the potential of the series has remained unrealized.

1986: The Battle

Another adaptation of Western fiction, this time - the story of Stephen King. A former military man who became a killer kills the director of a toy factory. Having completed the order, he receives a parcel with toy soldiers produced at the victim's factory. The soldiers somehow come to life and attack the killer. The battle ends with the victory of the toys, since the set contains a miniature thermonuclear charge.


The cartoon is made in the technique of total animation. This means that along with the characters, the backgrounds move and change in order to convey the movement of the camera. The costly and time-consuming method is rarely used in hand-drawn animation, but aptly. The “battle" total animation gave incredible dynamism. A short cartoon looks no worse than Die Hard, which was released two years later.



An attentive viewer will find in the first minute of the cartoon a reference to the scene of driving along the Tokyo interchanges in Tarkovsky's Solaris. A futuristic landscape with an endless labyrinth of roads emphasizes that everything happens in the near, gloomy future.

1988: The Pass

Talking about the fantastic Soviet animation, one cannot fail to mention the iconic "Pass". The cartoon was shot in the first chapter of the novel by the science fiction writer Cyr Bulychev "The Village", and the author himself wrote the script.



"Village" tells about the fate of the space expedition, whose ship made an emergency landing on an unknown planet. The surviving people had to escape from the ship, fleeing radiation from a damaged engine. People founded the village, learned to hunt with bow and arrow, raised children, and over and over again made attempts to return through the pass to the ship. In the cartoon, a group of three teenagers and an adult goes to the ship. An adult dies, and children better adapted to a dangerous world get to their destination.


"Pass" stands out even against the background of other avant-garde sci-fi cartoons of that time. The graphics for the film were drawn by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, known for controversial historical theories. To show the terrible alien world, he used his illustrations for "The Master and Margarita." The music was written by Alexander Gradsky, including a song based on poetry by the poet Sasha Cherny.



The director of the Pass was Vladimir Tarasov, mentioned several times in this collection. Tarasov read “The Village” in the magazine “Knowledge is Power” and was inspired by the question of what human society actually represents. The result was a scary and exciting cartoon with an open ending.

1989: “Tigers can be found here”

Long before James Cameron directed his Avatar, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story on the same subject. A human ship arrives on an uninhabited planet to extract minerals. A wonderful alien world has reason and hospitably welcomes earthlings. When a representative of the sponsor of the expedition tries to start drilling, the planet sends a tiger to him. The expedition flies away, leaving one young astronaut.


Soviet animators managed to transfer Bradbury’s philosophical history to the screen with almost no difference. In the cartoon, the evil leader of the expedition manages to activate the bomb before his death. Earthlings sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the planet: they load a bomb on a ship and fly away. Criticism of predatory capitalism also existed in the original text, so a dramatic twist is added to add action to the plot. Unlike the “Contract”, in this cartoon there are no opposite meanings.

1991-1992: "Vampires of Geona"

Soviet animation did not die immediately with the collapse of the Union. In the 90s, several obviously “Soviet” sci-fi cartoons were released.


In 1991 and 1992, director Gennady Tishchenko presented the animated films “Vampires of Geona” and “Masters of Geona”. He wrote the script according to his own story. The plot is as follows: the inspector of the Cosmoecological Commission (KEC) Yanin goes to the planet Geon. There, local pterodactyls (“vampires”) bite the colonists and prevent the interstellar group from developing mineral deposits. It turns out that the planet is inhabited, local sentient beings live under water in symbiosis with vampires and other fauna. The concern leaves the planet because its activities harm the environment.


The most striking feature of the cartoons: two American characters, copied from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The giant drawn "Arnie" is akin to the hypertrophied 90s comic book superheroes. Next to him, the bearded Russian Yanin seems like a child. Against the backdrop of the unexpected Hollywood “cranberry”, the main philosophical message of the film is somewhat lost.



Cartoons were supposed to be a whole series called "Star World". At the end of the second episode, Yanin optimistically states that people will still return to Geon, but his words were not destined to come true.

1994-1995: AMBA

A couple of years after the Geona, Tishchenko made a second attempt to continue the space saga. Two episodes of the cartoon "AMBA" talk about how a scientist developed a way to grow cities from biomass. One such village, AMBA (Automorphic Bioarchitectural Ensemble) was grown in the Martian desert, and another planted on a distant planet. The connection with the project was interrupted, and there they sent the already familiar Inspector Yanin with an unnamed partner.


The visual style of the film has become much more “western”. However, the content remained true to the previous course on solid Soviet science fiction. Tishchenko is a fan of science fiction writer Ivan Efremov. In two short cartoons, the director tried to embody the idea that in the future of technological civilization the end would come (hence the name).


Serious problems arose with the exposure; this is a typical case when people are talking about what is happening, rather than showing it. There are enough battles and heroism on the screen, but the pace of events is “torn”: first, the alien tentacles attack the heroes, then they patiently listen to the story of where these tentacles came from.



Perhaps in the third part of the "Star World" it would be possible to get rid of the shortcomings of the previous ones. Unfortunately, the Soviet tradition in the new millennium is finally gone, so now all these cartoons are history.

Didn’t your favorite sci-fi cartoon come into the selection? Tell us about him in the comments.