Ear fishing – Newspaper Kommersant No. 243 (7444) dated 12/29/2022

On January 1, Dmitry Dyachenko’s “Cheburashka” will be released on the screens, which, apparently, is destined to become the main hit of the New Year’s rental. Julia Shagelman she suggested that adults would not recognize the cute eared animal from their childhood in the new Cheburashka, and she strongly doubted that the new generation of small viewers would love him.

Director Dmitry Dyachenko shot three parts of the Last Hero franchise by the same Yellow, Black and White studio, which, together with Soyuzmultfilm, the START video service, and the Rossiya 1 and STS TV channels, gave birth to a new Cheburashka. For several previous years, it was the tales about the clash of Russian folk heroes with the modern world that were the New Year’s juggernaut, for which the rental was released from foreign competitors (with the support of the Disney studio). Now Cheburashka has taken this sacred place, designed to re-acquaint children with their parents’ favorite hero, and for these latter to remember their childhood and forget that the new Avatar is being watched all over the world these days.

Considerable efforts have been invested for this: the film has eleven producers, four screenwriters (two of whom also had a hand in The Last Knights; Eduard Uspensky is not listed in the credits at all) and an impressive budget of 850 million rubles. Also, distributors proudly report that six tons of oranges were used for filming, and at this point it becomes especially sad for the vain translation of the product.

Adults who grew up on Roman Kachanov’s cartoons should get ready for surprises. For example, there is no crocodile Gena in the film – instead, Cheburashka’s best friend becomes the gloomy misanthrope Gennady Petrovich (Sergey Garmash), who works as a gardener in the arboretum of an unnamed southern city: the shooting took place in Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk and Sochi, but the film takes place in a conditional universe that has, however, such signs of Russian reality as corruption and traffic police. The strange little animal doesn’t come to town in a crate of oranges, it’s brought here by a tornado, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. In general, there are many references in the tape to the world’s fabulous and not very heritage: “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, “The Three Musketeers”, “Chocolate” by Lasse Hallström and even “Blade Runner”. Russian and Soviet culture is also not forgotten: Cheburashka and Gena joke about “abyrvalg” and “warmthday”, and the scene after the credits is a literal adaptation of the kindergarten joke about “get this off the wheel”.

All this, I think, will not be very interesting for children, for whom the main attraction is Cheburashka himself, voiced by Olga Kuzmina. Alas, in his case, another anecdote comes to mind, about a bad restaurant, where the food is tasteless and the portions are small. The animal, despite the year and a half spent on computer graphics, is drawn rather sloppy. Its size changes all the time (this is not a trick, but a technical error), it moves unnaturally, and in the scenes of interaction with live actors it is very noticeable that they grab onto the void and talk to it. At the same time, there are discouragingly few funny tricks of Cheburashka in the film, and the two main storylines are also not at all childish. One is dedicated to the family drama of Gennady Petrovich and his difficult relationship with an adult daughter (Polina Maksimova), and the second is about the attempts of a bad rich woman, whose name is not Shapoklyak, but Rimma (Elena Yakovleva) due to copyright problems, to squeeze her from this daughter confectionery and candy store.

Cheburashka becomes a common denominator and conciliator for all of them, although he himself is tormented by an existential crisis all the way, trying to understand who he is. Everything ends, of course, well: the eared one finds his identity and gets a name, the daughter forgives Uncle Gena, and even Rimma takes the first steps towards correction. At the same time, the feeling with which you leave the session is best described by one of the words read by Cheburashka in Dahl’s dictionary: hopelessness.