Cinema on weekends. A cautionary tale of loss and discovery

The new film “Cheburashka” has been at the box office since the beginning of the year, and not everyone has watched it yet, but many people are already talking about it.

In our memory, this is perhaps the first film about which people say what they are. Popular opinion finally broke through the filters. Directed by Dmitry Dyachenko. Screenwriters Vitaly Shlyappo, Vasily Kutsenko, Vyacheslav Zub. Producers Eduard Iloyan, Denis Zhalinsky, Vitaly Shlyappo. The budget of the picture is 850 million rubles. Collections in the world have already reached 75.6 million dollars, in Russia 62.4 million dollars. That is, the film worked out the costs, including advertising and promotion. For comparison: the budget of the film “Chuk and Gek. Big adventure” 201 million rubles with virtually no advertising, and computer graphics are not weaker.

The film is very long, almost two hours (113 minutes), and tediously dragged along with all the attempts at cool stunt work, clowning, humor, colorful landscapes, drone shots and a swing at meme-forming key phrases from the characters’ lexicon.

For example, “You are best at betraying those who love you.” “It’s hard to be human.” “You people are sad because you don’t know how to forgive.” All these unpretentious maxims could be called banality if they were not perceived as a simple answer to complex universal questions.

Cheburashka got acquainted with the life of people and concluded for himself that he would rather remain a toy than become a man. From the classic puppet Cheburashka in the new film, there was his computer successor and a song about a blue helicopter with a wizard on board.

According to the Kinopoisk website, they worked on the script for a year and a half. Filming took place from September 2021 to June 2022 in Moscow and the Moscow region, as well as in Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk and Sochi. Six tons of oranges were used on the filming of the picture. In addition to the actors, 26 thoroughbred rats, 8 canaries and parrots, 6 guinea pigs, a bulldog, an iguana and a giraffe participated in the filming.

Cheburashka is the only cartoon character in the film 65 cm tall, with the exception of one scene where, to intimidate a bully boy, he grows to the size of King Kong. Cheburashka himself is represented as a very hooligan puppy or kitten, capable of making a decent pogrom in the house. Causes significant damage to the agriculture of the country of origin, the exporter of oranges. The orange orchard workers, who do not understand jokes, are chasing Cheburashka with pitchforks, shovels and not too humane intentions, preparing snares for him. Until Her Majesty Nature intervenes and extradites Cheburashka to her place of permanent residence, along with a huge number of oranges.

Orange rain falls on the city.

The first viewers of Eduard Uspensky’s puppet cartoon about the crocodile Gena and the incomprehensible animal Cheburashka from a box of oranges remember the time when the orange was a sacred fruit in the USSR, a symbol of freedom. This is the story of Vasily Aksyonov “Oranges from Morocco”. A dry cargo ship with a hold full of oranges arrives at the northern Far Eastern port. And happiness begins in the port town. Vasily Aksyonov spent his childhood in Kolyma with his convicted mother Evgenia Ginzburg. Freely bobbing on the hair dryer. Both, each in their own way, described the time of the country’s revival after a difficult and very evil era with waves of bloody events, an open surge in crime after the abolition of serfdom. The first persistent skylight began in the sixties. Kindness and a sense of a wonderful future returned to the souls of people.

The point here, of course, is not in exotic citrus fruits, but in the natural reaction of the vitality of the Russian people to devastation, war and repression.

The current time with us is very similar to what Aksyonov and Uspensky reflected in the sixties. Evgenia Ginzburg in the documentary novel “The Steep Route” described the full cycle from entering a mental epidemic to exiting it.

The creators of the new “Cheburashka” presented complimentary fragments of that cycle on the example of several personal destinies. Andrey Tumanov, the chief gardener of Russia, claims that citrus fruits do not have wild ancestors, they are all artificial. Indeed, the domesticated forms of banana, watermelon, plum, corn, wheat, cats, dogs, cows, pigs, and man himself have undergone such a powerful saltation evolution that, compared with a real orange, the painted Cheburashka does not seem to be some kind of special exotic.

We are all artificial in our company of the constituting elements of civilization. In this coordinate system, the criterion of naturalness are two signs of a single harmonious whole – beauty and truth.

The second birth of Cheburashka, behind the obscurity of the first, becomes a holiday of reconciliation of the whole family with the participation of a re-educated enemy. The country of Russia experienced a new birth several times and now it is again becoming the guardian of beauty and truth.

The new film “Cheburashka”, in general, is about this. It is filled with the inexhaustible philosophical meaning of the roll call of seemingly incomparable epochs. The authors of the picture deliberately excluded the binding to a specific time and unequivocally proved the cause of all human problems in our by no means human relations with each other.

Not only in works of art, but even in scientific research, it sometimes happens that the authors themselves do not fully realize the universality of the discovery that they unwittingly made. But this is more often about negative phenomena such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s brain trichinae. With the formula of happiness about beauty, the great writer turned out to be somehow indistinct, he remained incomprehensible in this part.

To derive the formula for happiness, we have cartoons. Let them not believe us, but we are convinced that Russia became the birthplace of the happiness formula back in Soviet times, and the new Russian cinema successfully continues to develop the same line at a new level of quality.

The new film “Cheburashka” is about the dangers of irresponsible treatment of animals, which we ourselves are. With a fight, the adopted law on the responsible attitude towards animals does not apply to people, and this legislative gap was discussed several times in the Duma. For the deputies, people do not belong to animals, and the salvation of drowning people is the work of the drowning people themselves. The new “Cheburashka” is a multi-vector parable about the struggle between good and evil within the people themselves, and not between them. These are the stories of three very different children: spoiled, capricious Sonya (Eva Smirnova), Grisha (Ilya Kondratenko), who was silent until the age of five, and his mother Tanya (Polina Maksimova, in childhood Alisa Mynai) with a retrospective into the past, where the enmity with father Gena (Sergey Garmash, in his youth Artyom Bystrov).

The absurd death of his wife, Tanya’s mother, drives Gena out of the house and dooms her to wandering. In her new life, Gena finds herself in the role of an arboretum attendant, painfully committed to maintaining order. The appearance of Cheburashka in his exotic house is like a tornado. However, the development of history is dictated not by emotions, but by circumstances.

In Gene Garmash, it is not difficult to guess a puppet crocodile, who in a past life worked as a crocodile in a zoo. And so that the viewer does not doubt, Gena’s friend, chess partner Valery Zavgorodniy (Fyodor Dobronravov), directly called him an alligator. Zavgorodny works in a zoo adjacent to the arboretum as a specialist in exotic animals and flatly refuses to accept Cheburashka so that he is not accused of experiments on animals.

In the rich grandmother Sonya Rimma (Elena Yakovleva), the Old Woman Shapoklyak is clearly guessed. Rimma demands from the director of the arboretum (Natalya Shchukina) to fire Gena and tries to restore order in the institution. Her orders stimulate the self-organization of the indigenous inhabitants of the arboretum. The headmistress takes the side of Gena, with whom she had always been in conflict with all her unspent female power. The protesters are joined by a janitor (Zhannat Kerimbaev) and a powerful ice cream saleswoman Galya (Sofya Zaika) – “I have been training in vain for so many years ?!”

In Russia, the role of self-organization is generally great, but its vector often reverses compared to the classic version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “Lady’s Visit” in the format of a public hunt for a designated victim. Rats from Rimma play their role in the competitive struggle of economic entities. The genre of the film, presented as a family comedy, is actually a combined one. It combines the parable with a parody comedy about a business woman and her male team.

Very intelligible, colorful and understandable somewhere from the age of 10-12 years. And it is absolutely relevant to the expectations of former children brought up on Cheburashki and other Soviet animation with a simplified layout of good and evil. Marking 6+ is a clear exaggeration. Young children are not interested in the events on the screen. When the lights came on, the floor of the theater was generously littered with crushed popcorn. For some reason, this picture caused vague associations with the impression of viewing.

Questions remain for the organizers of the national cultural policy. Why instill in Russia Western habits of chewing airy emptiness to distract from the screen narrative? Why is it always the man’s fault? Cheburashka calls Gena “mom”, he is surprised, but does not argue. Throughout the film, the characters are looking for a zoological name for him. They start with the Belarusian Eared Shepherd Dog breed. Next come to mind a parrot and a monkey; Cheburashka happily combines “Papuzyan”. In other statements, Cheburashka suddenly acquires inhuman wisdom and an adult voice of a convincing timbre.

It is hard to imagine that such a film can be understood by a child. Scenes of cruelty here, of course, are not of the Hollywood format in lawlessness, but they are there, written out dynamically and not built in very organically. It turned out good with fists. Cheburashka is played by a computer and Olga Kuzmina with the support of Katerina Cherednik.

What the fairy-tale character did not say on the screen was deciphered by the deputy, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Nina Ostanina. She had a powerful incentive, life in the Duma is a fairy tale, a circus, and a war with the world. “Cheburashka” became for Ostanina an outlet and a window into the normal world with ordinary human passions.

But the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Culture, Elena Yampolskaya, in assessing the film, did without enthusiasm. She came to watch a movie with her husband and three-year-old adopted daughter. I really didn’t like the running after Cheburashka of serious men with pitchforks.

Here another question arises for the organizers of the post-Soviet cultural policy. Why are there no experts in parliament or government capable of revealing beauty and truth to protect national values? The deputies themselves, together with the Minister of Culture, are unable to understand the genres of cinematography, which is intended for what.

Why, for any reason, do they refer to international experience, where it is all artificially confusing?

If, nevertheless, such films as Cheburashka are released, and he is not the only one, this means that the Russian cultural policy still has a head.

Natalia Vakurova, Lev MOSKOVKIN.