Thanks very much! And we've found Soviet-era sources incredibly valuable in our research into animation from that time -- old issues of Cinema Art and Soviet Screen, Ivanov-Vano's Frame by Frame, Sergei Asenin's books and so on. The Soviet stuff definitely has gaps, but current historians like Georgy Borodin and Sergey Kapkov are filling in a lot of those, and we're big fans of their work.
Thanks for the write-up about this excellent film. I never saw it as one for adolescents, but a great example of children's sci-fi - the sort of friendly, non-hard vision of sci-fi where birds can fly between planets. The original book series was and is very popular, and this is probably the most popular adaptation (though the live action 1980s one is also good). I've always felt that Kachanov's strength, whether in puppet or 2D cel animation, was in how faithfully he portrayed children. He would always pay attention to little details, and his children always felt real. All of Kachanov's films are on Animatsiya, and anyone who watches his filmography will, I think, see what I mean: https://www.animatsiya.net/director.php?directorid=45
In the Cheburashka films, the child in question is, of course, Cheburashka. In this one, it is Alice. The story is a bit meandering (although the "detective" part of it works well enough, I think), but the heart of it is Alice's relationship with her dad, rather than some science fiction idea. There's a reason that the final shot of the film is of them together.
A few years later, he tried to recapture the magic (somewhat) and made another animated film starring children, aliens and endangered animals: "Two Tickets to India": https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=874
However, the sci-fi connection was now so weak that it felt like a complete afterthought, and the result isn't nearly as engaging (although it still looks nice).
I still maintain that "Secret" is the right translation for the title, not "Mystery". The Russian word "tayna" can be translated both ways. The question of which is the correct one is, I think, answered by the plot: the "third planet" in question is not mysterious, but it does hide a secret!
Didn't know you guys were involved in the Deaf Crocodile releases! I've added a mention of the new BluRay release on the Animatsiya page for the film. Have there been any problems with this project related to the current political climate and economic sanctions?
Also, do you think there's any chance of a restoration for Leonid Nosyrev's feature? https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=48 It's one of my absolute favourites, but all the existing releases of it are bad in various ways. The individual parts of it have already gotten nicely restored, but the animation unique to the feature (the connecting scenes, with the fisherman narrator) have not. It's a hard one to translate, but I'd let them use my English subtitles for free.
Or perhaps "Optimus Mundus", Russian animation's big project of the 1990s helmed by Mihail Aldashin, who bailed just before the end? I've been working on subtitling that one, but it has never been properly released outside of film festivals - one of its owners still holds all materials hostage ("One of the producers, Dmitry Gorbunov, notes in a 2008 interview that his partner keeps all the material, willing neither to give it for free to some cultural TV channel, nor to release it on DVD in minuscule circulation – just to support pirates, as he feels – and so, it still awaits its day in the sun" - a quote from Mikhail Gurevich's article "Teasing the Sacred Cows to the End of History: Appropriation of Emblematic Imagery in Late- and Post-Soviet Animation." from the 2019 book "Propaganda, Ideology, Animation", p.28). It has an all-star cast of many of the best Russian and international animators (including Aleksandr Petrov, Bill Plympton, Robert Sahakyants, Ivan Maximov, Georges Schwizgebel...), provides an unforgettable portrait of the city of Moscow in the 1990s, and I think is a very impressive film despite some of the individual segments getting butchered when the final edit was done. (So any proper release would ideally need to include both the final cut and all the individual segments separately)
Thanks for another great comment! Third Planet does feel like it's aimed more at children than teenagers, for sure -- although in context of the interviews, it seems like Kachanov, Khitruk and Khanyutin might have been using "adolescent" in the broader sense (viewers aged 10-19) rather than limiting it to teens only. And very much agreed about Kachanov's portrayals of children. The Mitten is another great example of that!
Regarding the Deaf Crocodile Blu-rays, we're involved as contributors -- the guys who run the company are really friendly, and they pull in folks to write essays and create special features.
We're not privy to all the details, but they seem to be working pretty freely with Soyuzmultfilm on these, at least so far. A bunch of Treasures of Soviet Animation collections have been announced already, including one dedicated to Norstein's catalog. Volume 2 is supposed to include The Snow Queen. You can see a list of what they've confirmed here: https://mailchi.mp/deafcrocodile/presale-begins-16531617
We've heard that more volumes could be revealed later -- but the specifics are up in the air. That said, unfortunately, we're not aware of Nosyrev's movie being part of the conversation so far. We'll reach out to them about Optimus Mundus, though: it seems totally up their alley, since they love recovering weird, lost, out-of-the-way movies and have already worked a fair amount with Bill Plympton!
Lastly -- valid point about Third Planet's title! We just went with the one used most commonly in English sources. Secret absolutely makes more sense with the story.
"might have been using "adolescent" in the broader sense (viewers aged 10-19) rather than limiting it to teens only"
The film is often loved by the very youngest children, though (say, aged 4-5). From what I've seen, anyway.
It would be really amazing if the guys at Deaf Crocodile actually succeeded in bringing about a proper restoration and release of "Optimus Mundus". Although I imagine it won't be easy, or it would've happened already. I definitely recommend reading Mikhail Gurevich's article about it (it's in English).
I think their list of upcoming releases looks quite solid, if rather "safe". Maybe that's the point. I'm probably looking forward to the "Mowgli" one most of all, as I don't think there has been a true BluRay HD restoration release of that one yet (only fake ones, upscaled from DVD sources).
I hope that for Ivanov-Vano's "The Humpbacked Horse" (1947), they attempt to restore the sound as well. The image restoration that has been done already by Soyuzmultfilm is quite good, but in the version I saw it seems as if the sound has not been restored at all, and you can often really tell - which is a shame, as the music and songs are lovely.
One other thing, regarding "Soviet anime". I think the one who may have come closest was Gennadiy Tishchenko, particularly "The Vampires of Geona"
Well, I guess it wasn't the USSR any more after the first film, but still. The visual style is heavily-anime inspired, it's aimed at teens or adults, and the plots, particularly for "AMBA", are hard sci-fi (because he was also a well-known sci-fi author adapting his own stories). Unfortunately, his career began at the very end of the USSR and the beginning of the economic disaster that followed. He was forced to give up animation just when he was really beginning to hit his stride. A real missed opportunity.
Thanks for this extra info! Tishchenko's work is a really strange and intriguing meeting point between anime and classic Soviet animation. Very cool to learn about this.
One quick thing. We reached out to Deaf Crocodile and they're definitely interested in Optimus Mundus -- they tackle a lot of tough licensing situations and are willing to give this one a shot. But they wanted to ask if you knew a way to contact Dmitry Gorbunov. Honestly, contact info for any of the main people involved would be an excellent starting point. Just let us know!
A full list of the shorts commissioned for "Optimus Mundus" (or the "Moscow Animation Project" as per its working title), and the directors involved, can be found here: https://animator.ru/db/?ver=eng&p=show_film&fid=1759
The two producers were Dmitry Gorbunov and Aleksandr Kuguchin, with Kuguchin being the one who's reportedly currently keeping the film (however, the source for that info is Mikhail Gurevich, who in his article cites a 2008 interview which is now long gone from the internet). They provided the funding and initial concept. I do not know of any way to contact either. Mikhail Aldashin was the creative supervisor (up until just before the end) and responsible for bringing in all of those famous animators who joined the project.
Aldashin is much more of a public figure and probably easier to reach.
He may know how to find Kuguchin (although I doubt he's had any contact with him since the 1990s), and very likely the other animators who worked on the project. Many of them kept copies of their own segments to the film, because many of those segments have since been posted online in various places.
Film critic Mikhail Gurevich, who wrote that detailed article about the film, lives in the US and is a member of ASIFA. One of the places he writes for, ZippyFrames, has a contact form: https://www.zippyframes.com/contact-us
Below the following line I'm including a few relevant paragraphs from Gurevich's article:
(note: I think that it's a strong film even as is, and actually I find the added narration often interesting in its own right, although I can understand why Aldashin felt so frustrated with what happened)
----
The duo of producers Dmitry Gorbunov and Aleksandr Kuguchin, at the occasion of 850th anniversary of Moscow that was to be pompously celebrated in 1997, came up with the idea of a ‘collective portrait’ of the city in a broad mosaic of animated extra-shorts commissioned on purpose, supposedly from all over the world, with not much strings attached, except for the general theme to be explored more or less at will. Upon securing the support of city authorities (and, one must suppose, directly seeking state or rather city funding which was forthcoming, if not primarily, for money-laundering purposes, in the spirit and practice of the time, though it is hard to tell for sure), they started looking for contributors. Mikhail Aldashin assumed the position of creative supervisor, using his own extensive professional connections to attract talents. As a result, in about half a year, some fifty submissions, from one to three minutes in length on average, were in fact received representing perhaps most everybody noteworthy on the Russian animation scene – from old-time veterans like Nikolai Serebryakov, to promising beginners like Dmitry Geller, with Valeriy Ugarov, Natalia Orlova, Maria Mouat, Ivan Maksimov and many others in between (including émigrés or those who went to work abroad temporarily) – plus some recent former compatriots like Robert Sahakyants from Armenia and Vladimir Petkevich from Belarus; and also a good number of foreign directors, from Bill Plympton to Georges Schwizgebel, among most known. The resulting collection showed quite a surprisingly high proportion of success – original and bright mini-films – and appeared to be quite diverse in approaches and nature. It came to showcase, indeed, a unique anthology of storylines, techniques and styles; and individual pieces, also strikingly different in genres and thematic focus, from lyrical sketches and visualized jokes to rather politicized posters and historiosophic meditations or even sort of architectural reviews. The very format of miniatures with a preset general theme and a free ride in all the rest turned to be quite a fruitful ground.
Now, the question arose: what to do with all those truly inhomogeneous riches? Having not found a sound organizing principle or an ingenious genre-form for that in advance, the producers retreated to the idea of the artificial framework of a quasi-documentary: a cabby drives a provincial dude around town, spinning yarns on the way, in quite feuilletonistic fashion, while the visuals combine old newsreel footage and animation inserts; in that, some individual entries were dropped altogether, others suffered unceremonious cuts and reediting, with original soundtracks often obstructed by chatty voice-over. Arranged in such a shape (rather than really directed) by the producers’ team (while Aldashin chose to leave the project at that dubious stage), this fifty-six minutes ‘documentary drawn film about the heroic city of Moscow, with pictures, music and expert’s comments’, as the subtitle goes, was finally named Optimus Mundus (The Best of the Worlds; in Latin, a true mother-tongue of ‘ancient Moscowities’ as was jokingly justified in narration) and marked as of 1998, though was presented publicly in fact a couple of years later; it went to some festivals but until now has never been really released commercially in any form.
[...]
I strongly suspect that the Optimus Mundus producers were not only creatively unprepared to deal with all the material they had gotten in hand, but in other ways too – confused if not maybe even scared by its unexpected accents and inclinations. By the end of the transition decade – practically already at the dawn of a new period (and a new presidency with all the changes it was to entail) – one could sense something different in the air. So then, the ‘mockumentary’ framework was not just a choice of convenience and bad taste but rather seemed to serve as a safe escape – what else was there to cover this yawning pit of the past, with no sure bridges through it and to the almost completely absent present itself.
Thanks very much for this -- it's a huge help. Will pass along your tips to the Deaf Crocodile guys! It's possible that nothing will come of it, but it's worth exploring.
It’s so wonderful that someone in the US believes Soviet animation is still worth watching, even decades after its release. The Mystery of the Third Planet is one of my absolute favorites. I was about five when I first saw it, and the experience was unforgettable — it defined my love for sci-fi. At first, it was Soviet authors who wrote for children (like Kir Bulychov — the author of this very Mystery of the Third Planet), and when I was ten I discovered my first novels by Isaac Asimov.
We're happy to highlight wonderful films like this one! The Soviet era produced tons of incredible animation, and awareness of it has been building in the US for a while, especially thanks to social media and YouTube. There's a good amount of buzz behind the new Treasures of Soviet Animation Blu-ray collections that are hitting America -- we're hoping that they introduce even more people to this work, including The Mystery of the Third Planet.
My hopes for that too! As someone who grew up with these animations, if I can contribute to Deaf Crocodile’s project with my perspective and experience, I’d be glad to help. 😊
I know that I am Frankelda, and Little Nightmare Films have been in the works for a while, but there’s such a noticeable resurgence of stop-motion lately, and while it’s not a direct response to AI, it feels like one
There's definitely a ton of activity in stop motion right now. A good deal of it was building before GenAI got big, but it does feel like the AI stuff is adding more and more momentum. Arturo Ambriz even contrasted Frankelda against AI during our chat at Annecy:
"... in AI, you get results. And stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. All the flaws, everything that shakes, is a celebration of the process. With the presence of AI turning the industry inside out, we are celebrating that everything is handmade."
Mistery of the Third Planet has also a magnificent soundtrack by Alexander Zatsepin.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nBiBwJu7aRv8ESTmkhjZW6DMxGdew_8Wc&si=z_xvxwYEbe-mIpHY
We're huge fans of this film's music -- it's just incredible. Thanks very much for the link!
Great stuff, i’m also fascinated that you used some old, unknown, RUSSIAN! resources, it just shows how hard you work to get such results
Thanks very much! And we've found Soviet-era sources incredibly valuable in our research into animation from that time -- old issues of Cinema Art and Soviet Screen, Ivanov-Vano's Frame by Frame, Sergei Asenin's books and so on. The Soviet stuff definitely has gaps, but current historians like Georgy Borodin and Sergey Kapkov are filling in a lot of those, and we're big fans of their work.
Thanks for the write-up about this excellent film. I never saw it as one for adolescents, but a great example of children's sci-fi - the sort of friendly, non-hard vision of sci-fi where birds can fly between planets. The original book series was and is very popular, and this is probably the most popular adaptation (though the live action 1980s one is also good). I've always felt that Kachanov's strength, whether in puppet or 2D cel animation, was in how faithfully he portrayed children. He would always pay attention to little details, and his children always felt real. All of Kachanov's films are on Animatsiya, and anyone who watches his filmography will, I think, see what I mean: https://www.animatsiya.net/director.php?directorid=45
In the Cheburashka films, the child in question is, of course, Cheburashka. In this one, it is Alice. The story is a bit meandering (although the "detective" part of it works well enough, I think), but the heart of it is Alice's relationship with her dad, rather than some science fiction idea. There's a reason that the final shot of the film is of them together.
A few years later, he tried to recapture the magic (somewhat) and made another animated film starring children, aliens and endangered animals: "Two Tickets to India": https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=874
However, the sci-fi connection was now so weak that it felt like a complete afterthought, and the result isn't nearly as engaging (although it still looks nice).
I still maintain that "Secret" is the right translation for the title, not "Mystery". The Russian word "tayna" can be translated both ways. The question of which is the correct one is, I think, answered by the plot: the "third planet" in question is not mysterious, but it does hide a secret!
Didn't know you guys were involved in the Deaf Crocodile releases! I've added a mention of the new BluRay release on the Animatsiya page for the film. Have there been any problems with this project related to the current political climate and economic sanctions?
Also, do you think there's any chance of a restoration for Leonid Nosyrev's feature? https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=48 It's one of my absolute favourites, but all the existing releases of it are bad in various ways. The individual parts of it have already gotten nicely restored, but the animation unique to the feature (the connecting scenes, with the fisherman narrator) have not. It's a hard one to translate, but I'd let them use my English subtitles for free.
Or perhaps "Optimus Mundus", Russian animation's big project of the 1990s helmed by Mihail Aldashin, who bailed just before the end? I've been working on subtitling that one, but it has never been properly released outside of film festivals - one of its owners still holds all materials hostage ("One of the producers, Dmitry Gorbunov, notes in a 2008 interview that his partner keeps all the material, willing neither to give it for free to some cultural TV channel, nor to release it on DVD in minuscule circulation – just to support pirates, as he feels – and so, it still awaits its day in the sun" - a quote from Mikhail Gurevich's article "Teasing the Sacred Cows to the End of History: Appropriation of Emblematic Imagery in Late- and Post-Soviet Animation." from the 2019 book "Propaganda, Ideology, Animation", p.28). It has an all-star cast of many of the best Russian and international animators (including Aleksandr Petrov, Bill Plympton, Robert Sahakyants, Ivan Maximov, Georges Schwizgebel...), provides an unforgettable portrait of the city of Moscow in the 1990s, and I think is a very impressive film despite some of the individual segments getting butchered when the final edit was done. (So any proper release would ideally need to include both the final cut and all the individual segments separately)
Thanks for another great comment! Third Planet does feel like it's aimed more at children than teenagers, for sure -- although in context of the interviews, it seems like Kachanov, Khitruk and Khanyutin might have been using "adolescent" in the broader sense (viewers aged 10-19) rather than limiting it to teens only. And very much agreed about Kachanov's portrayals of children. The Mitten is another great example of that!
Regarding the Deaf Crocodile Blu-rays, we're involved as contributors -- the guys who run the company are really friendly, and they pull in folks to write essays and create special features.
We're not privy to all the details, but they seem to be working pretty freely with Soyuzmultfilm on these, at least so far. A bunch of Treasures of Soviet Animation collections have been announced already, including one dedicated to Norstein's catalog. Volume 2 is supposed to include The Snow Queen. You can see a list of what they've confirmed here: https://mailchi.mp/deafcrocodile/presale-begins-16531617
We've heard that more volumes could be revealed later -- but the specifics are up in the air. That said, unfortunately, we're not aware of Nosyrev's movie being part of the conversation so far. We'll reach out to them about Optimus Mundus, though: it seems totally up their alley, since they love recovering weird, lost, out-of-the-way movies and have already worked a fair amount with Bill Plympton!
Lastly -- valid point about Third Planet's title! We just went with the one used most commonly in English sources. Secret absolutely makes more sense with the story.
"might have been using "adolescent" in the broader sense (viewers aged 10-19) rather than limiting it to teens only"
The film is often loved by the very youngest children, though (say, aged 4-5). From what I've seen, anyway.
It would be really amazing if the guys at Deaf Crocodile actually succeeded in bringing about a proper restoration and release of "Optimus Mundus". Although I imagine it won't be easy, or it would've happened already. I definitely recommend reading Mikhail Gurevich's article about it (it's in English).
I think their list of upcoming releases looks quite solid, if rather "safe". Maybe that's the point. I'm probably looking forward to the "Mowgli" one most of all, as I don't think there has been a true BluRay HD restoration release of that one yet (only fake ones, upscaled from DVD sources).
I hope that for Ivanov-Vano's "The Humpbacked Horse" (1947), they attempt to restore the sound as well. The image restoration that has been done already by Soyuzmultfilm is quite good, but in the version I saw it seems as if the sound has not been restored at all, and you can often really tell - which is a shame, as the music and songs are lovely.
One other thing, regarding "Soviet anime". I think the one who may have come closest was Gennadiy Tishchenko, particularly "The Vampires of Geona"
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1206
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1207
and his little known "AMBA" films:
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1210
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1211
Well, I guess it wasn't the USSR any more after the first film, but still. The visual style is heavily-anime inspired, it's aimed at teens or adults, and the plots, particularly for "AMBA", are hard sci-fi (because he was also a well-known sci-fi author adapting his own stories). Unfortunately, his career began at the very end of the USSR and the beginning of the economic disaster that followed. He was forced to give up animation just when he was really beginning to hit his stride. A real missed opportunity.
Thanks for this extra info! Tishchenko's work is a really strange and intriguing meeting point between anime and classic Soviet animation. Very cool to learn about this.
One quick thing. We reached out to Deaf Crocodile and they're definitely interested in Optimus Mundus -- they tackle a lot of tough licensing situations and are willing to give this one a shot. But they wanted to ask if you knew a way to contact Dmitry Gorbunov. Honestly, contact info for any of the main people involved would be an excellent starting point. Just let us know!
A full list of the shorts commissioned for "Optimus Mundus" (or the "Moscow Animation Project" as per its working title), and the directors involved, can be found here: https://animator.ru/db/?ver=eng&p=show_film&fid=1759
The two producers were Dmitry Gorbunov and Aleksandr Kuguchin, with Kuguchin being the one who's reportedly currently keeping the film (however, the source for that info is Mikhail Gurevich, who in his article cites a 2008 interview which is now long gone from the internet). They provided the funding and initial concept. I do not know of any way to contact either. Mikhail Aldashin was the creative supervisor (up until just before the end) and responsible for bringing in all of those famous animators who joined the project.
Aldashin is much more of a public figure and probably easier to reach.
You can try Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aldashin/
Or possibly the form on animator.ru: https://animator.ru/db/?p=show_person&pid=158
Or maybe LiveJournal: https://aldashin.livejournal.com/profile/
He may know how to find Kuguchin (although I doubt he's had any contact with him since the 1990s), and very likely the other animators who worked on the project. Many of them kept copies of their own segments to the film, because many of those segments have since been posted online in various places.
Film critic Mikhail Gurevich, who wrote that detailed article about the film, lives in the US and is a member of ASIFA. One of the places he writes for, ZippyFrames, has a contact form: https://www.zippyframes.com/contact-us
Below the following line I'm including a few relevant paragraphs from Gurevich's article:
(note: I think that it's a strong film even as is, and actually I find the added narration often interesting in its own right, although I can understand why Aldashin felt so frustrated with what happened)
----
The duo of producers Dmitry Gorbunov and Aleksandr Kuguchin, at the occasion of 850th anniversary of Moscow that was to be pompously celebrated in 1997, came up with the idea of a ‘collective portrait’ of the city in a broad mosaic of animated extra-shorts commissioned on purpose, supposedly from all over the world, with not much strings attached, except for the general theme to be explored more or less at will. Upon securing the support of city authorities (and, one must suppose, directly seeking state or rather city funding which was forthcoming, if not primarily, for money-laundering purposes, in the spirit and practice of the time, though it is hard to tell for sure), they started looking for contributors. Mikhail Aldashin assumed the position of creative supervisor, using his own extensive professional connections to attract talents. As a result, in about half a year, some fifty submissions, from one to three minutes in length on average, were in fact received representing perhaps most everybody noteworthy on the Russian animation scene – from old-time veterans like Nikolai Serebryakov, to promising beginners like Dmitry Geller, with Valeriy Ugarov, Natalia Orlova, Maria Mouat, Ivan Maksimov and many others in between (including émigrés or those who went to work abroad temporarily) – plus some recent former compatriots like Robert Sahakyants from Armenia and Vladimir Petkevich from Belarus; and also a good number of foreign directors, from Bill Plympton to Georges Schwizgebel, among most known. The resulting collection showed quite a surprisingly high proportion of success – original and bright mini-films – and appeared to be quite diverse in approaches and nature. It came to showcase, indeed, a unique anthology of storylines, techniques and styles; and individual pieces, also strikingly different in genres and thematic focus, from lyrical sketches and visualized jokes to rather politicized posters and historiosophic meditations or even sort of architectural reviews. The very format of miniatures with a preset general theme and a free ride in all the rest turned to be quite a fruitful ground.
Now, the question arose: what to do with all those truly inhomogeneous riches? Having not found a sound organizing principle or an ingenious genre-form for that in advance, the producers retreated to the idea of the artificial framework of a quasi-documentary: a cabby drives a provincial dude around town, spinning yarns on the way, in quite feuilletonistic fashion, while the visuals combine old newsreel footage and animation inserts; in that, some individual entries were dropped altogether, others suffered unceremonious cuts and reediting, with original soundtracks often obstructed by chatty voice-over. Arranged in such a shape (rather than really directed) by the producers’ team (while Aldashin chose to leave the project at that dubious stage), this fifty-six minutes ‘documentary drawn film about the heroic city of Moscow, with pictures, music and expert’s comments’, as the subtitle goes, was finally named Optimus Mundus (The Best of the Worlds; in Latin, a true mother-tongue of ‘ancient Moscowities’ as was jokingly justified in narration) and marked as of 1998, though was presented publicly in fact a couple of years later; it went to some festivals but until now has never been really released commercially in any form.
[...]
I strongly suspect that the Optimus Mundus producers were not only creatively unprepared to deal with all the material they had gotten in hand, but in other ways too – confused if not maybe even scared by its unexpected accents and inclinations. By the end of the transition decade – practically already at the dawn of a new period (and a new presidency with all the changes it was to entail) – one could sense something different in the air. So then, the ‘mockumentary’ framework was not just a choice of convenience and bad taste but rather seemed to serve as a safe escape – what else was there to cover this yawning pit of the past, with no sure bridges through it and to the almost completely absent present itself.
Thanks very much for this -- it's a huge help. Will pass along your tips to the Deaf Crocodile guys! It's possible that nothing will come of it, but it's worth exploring.
Where can you purchase this?
There are a few places to buy it, including Deaf Crocodile's store: https://deafcrocodile.com/products/treasures-of-soviet-animation-volume-one-standard-edition
We've read that they only ship to the US and Canada, though. For international sales, they work with DiabolikDVD: https://diabolikdvd.com/product/v1-treasures-of-soviet-animation-limited-edition-deaf-crocodile-blu-ray-preorder/
Excellent 👌 . Thank you.
Really appreciate that -- glad you enjoyed!
I watched and loved it because of your article!
Ah, great to hear that! Happy we could share this very odd and fascinating film.
It’s so wonderful that someone in the US believes Soviet animation is still worth watching, even decades after its release. The Mystery of the Third Planet is one of my absolute favorites. I was about five when I first saw it, and the experience was unforgettable — it defined my love for sci-fi. At first, it was Soviet authors who wrote for children (like Kir Bulychov — the author of this very Mystery of the Third Planet), and when I was ten I discovered my first novels by Isaac Asimov.
We're happy to highlight wonderful films like this one! The Soviet era produced tons of incredible animation, and awareness of it has been building in the US for a while, especially thanks to social media and YouTube. There's a good amount of buzz behind the new Treasures of Soviet Animation Blu-ray collections that are hitting America -- we're hoping that they introduce even more people to this work, including The Mystery of the Third Planet.
My hopes for that too! As someone who grew up with these animations, if I can contribute to Deaf Crocodile’s project with my perspective and experience, I’d be glad to help. 😊
I know that I am Frankelda, and Little Nightmare Films have been in the works for a while, but there’s such a noticeable resurgence of stop-motion lately, and while it’s not a direct response to AI, it feels like one
There's definitely a ton of activity in stop motion right now. A good deal of it was building before GenAI got big, but it does feel like the AI stuff is adding more and more momentum. Arturo Ambriz even contrasted Frankelda against AI during our chat at Annecy:
"... in AI, you get results. And stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. All the flaws, everything that shakes, is a celebration of the process. With the presence of AI turning the industry inside out, we are celebrating that everything is handmade."