“Having a cool player sets the bar in the industry” – Business – Kommersant

This week, Disney Channel announced the termination of broadcasting in Russia. Kommersant asked the newsmakers if they would miss the studio’s characters.

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Maria Tereshchenko, screenwriter, animation film producer, program director of the Big Animation Festival:

— As an animation expert, I consider Disney’s exit from Russia a catastrophe. The presence of such a cool player in the official field sets the bar in the industry to a certain height – with his departure, the bar will begin to drop sharply. As long as our products compete with and reach out to the big players like Disney, that’s a very good thing for us.

It is clear that Disney has different budgets, opportunities, players, personnel, so our animation has always tried to jump above its head in order to somehow compete. Thanks to this, incredible breakthroughs have been made over 20 years, our animation industry has developed very powerfully, many high-quality products have appeared: Smeshariki, Fixies, Masha, Bogatyrs.

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Andrey Plakhov, film critic:

– 12 years of Disney Channel broadcasting meet the cyclical law: more than this period in Russia, something good and worthwhile usually does not last. Disney characters will be missed, as will foreign films, plays, books that cannot seep through the new iron curtain.

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Harry Bardin, animator director:

– Disney left Russia, but I remained with my creative heritage – that’s all … I never used his characters, as well as any strangers. I have always had my own ideas, characters and images that I hope people still like. But it’s not that the drum is sad if the descendants do not see something interesting!

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Yuliana Slasheva, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the film studio “Soyuzmultfilm”, General Director of the Film Studio. M. Gorky:

— We have a lot of our heroes — you won’t get bored with them! For us, the exit of foreign content makers from the market is both an opportunity and a problem. Yes, in recent years the Russian animation industry has grown significantly, we have been able to achieve parity in the series. However, theatrical releases are still not enough, and we have to come up with new formats for the big screen.

We have yet to increase the volumes and capacities that foreign companies have in terms of blockbuster production. Soyuzmultfilm intends to release two full-length films a year. I think we will largely be able to fill the existing gap in the next three years. And the Disney classics remained in the libraries of online cinemas.

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Dmitry Loveiko, General Director of LLC “Masha and the Bear”:

“I’ve never been a Disney audience, and the kids have grown up. But Disney has always had a large audience. And of course she will lose. Disney has always had major projects in which they did not take or let anyone else in. Our cartoons went through other channels. How the children’s audience will react to his departure, I can not estimate, but I never had the feeling that everything would end without Disney products.

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Anton Sirenko, General Director of the company for the production of film products “Content Club”:

For me there is no direct negative effect. But I understand that a lot of children of Disney characters will be missed. I remember very well the days when the day in our family did not begin without the heroes of Pixar and Disney studios.

I started working with Disney when my son was still very young, and at the same time the film Cars appeared, which he watched a hundred times. The movie is wonderful, but I only got through it a couple of times. I worked for this company for quite a long time and had warm feelings for it.

I believe in the best – we have a lot of our wonderful artists, there are wonderful animated characters. There are not so many of them yet, and it will take time for them to become more.

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Alla Nasonova, President of the Children’s Book House Foundation (St. Petersburg):

– There is the Internet, watch the works of the Disney film studio, any other thing you want. In the post-war period, it was much more difficult, but the older generation and I enthusiastically watched the Bambi cartoon donated by the USSR in 1945 by Walt Disney. The next was the “trophy” “Snow White” – the best, in my opinion, works of the film studio so far! What happened is not critical – we have wonderful domestic cartoons for children, both funny, touching and instructive: for kids and adults.

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Alexey Voronkov, Head of the Association of Cinema Owners, CEO of the Cinema 5 network:

“Disney Channel going online will not increase our traffic – these are different consumption patterns. If the online platform is worse off, this does not mean that it will be better for the cinema. And over the past ten years, the audience of cinemas has not decreased, despite the development of online. But we basically lack content. At the same time, it has historically developed that the main Russian releases come out from November to January, and the rest of the year we worked with foreign ones.

Remove Disney – the best children’s studio – from the world of animation is impossible. In the words of its creator, “I do not make films primarily for children, I make them for the child in each of us, six years old or sixty.”

I will not deprive my children of Disney classics, but I will be able to protect them from new trends, where the next Snow White suddenly turns out to be an undecided transgender.

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Alla Dovlatova, TV and radio presenter:

– I have come out of the age of fans of the works of this TV channel, but my children, especially the youngest, love its heroes. “Lady Bug and Super Cat” is her favorite action. But I don’t see a tragedy in the channel’s departure.

We had and have our wonderful characters – “Well, wait a minute!”, “Fixies”, “Masha and the Bear”, “Smeshariki”. There is more sense and our psychology. In the same “Lady Bug and Super Cat” a hundred girls are fiercely fighting for a boy – a cat! What ideals does this form in expectant mothers? And there are still a lot of nuances with the promotion of Western ideals that are not characteristic of us.

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Tatyana Romanenko (Tutta Larsen), TV and radio presenter:

– In our family, we prefer Carousel and almost never watched Disney. My kids won’t notice the channel’s absence, even though they’ve watched Disney classics quite often. Access to these heroes does not stop – there are other formats. But we are not close to the latest “masterpieces” of Disney animation with its innovations, themes and narratives.

I think that Disney would be very surprised if they looked at the modern production of the studio with two dads or gender dysphoria of the main character. They work in a completely different paradigm than a happy childhood.

Group “Direct speech”