Review of Ilya Uchitel’s film “The Flying Ship”

After several postponements, Ilya Uchitel’s fairy tale film “The Flying Ship,” based on the 1979 cartoon by Harry Bardeen, has reached release. The author of the original film did not greet the new version favorably, but this is not the only difficulty that its creators faced. Talks about the thorny path of the film to the screens Julia Shagelman.

Like many large-scale domestic films currently being released, “The Flying Ship” turned out to be a long-term construction project. For the first time, one of its producers, Alexei Uchitel, spoke about plans to film a free remake of the popularly beloved cartoon back in 2019. The director was then supposed to be Oksana Karas, and the music producer was Konstantin Meladze. At the same time, the project was defended by the Cinema Fund and received financial support from it. Later, the director’s chair was taken by Ilya Uchitel, not only the son of a producer, but also an aspiring filmmaker: “The Flying Ship” is his third full-length work, and the most famous of the previous ones was the sports drama “Streltsov” (2020) about a Soviet football player with a difficult fate. The fate of the fairy tale also turned out to be not very simple: it was supposed to be released on January 1 of this year, then it was postponed to March 7, and then to the 21st.

In February, when it became known about the second postponement, the film’s producers considered it necessary to send an official letter to TASS, in which they emphasized, in particular, that “filming of the film was completed before the start of a special military operation in Ukraine” and this “then affected the work – completely “We reshot several scenes because we replaced one of the actresses who left for Kyiv.” Obviously, we are talking about Anastasia Mytrazhik, who played the role of Princess Zabava, who is played by Ksenia Traister in the final version of the film (in the letter this is described with the words “we have had a certain import substitution”).

In addition, the producers indicated that “in two episodic roles” they had “artists who spoke negatively about the start of a special military operation,” but their position should not affect “the fact that audiences across the country could enjoy the film.” In order not to interfere with the audience’s enjoyment, or for other reasons, which the film’s press service refused to comment on, the names of Ksenia Rappoport, who performed in the cameo role of a gypsy fortune teller, and Danila Kozlovsky, whose role is much larger: he played as many as five sisters of hedgehog grandmothers, on whom most of the comic scenes rest.

But let’s no longer be distracted by these not-at-all-fairy-tale details and, on the advice of the creators, let’s plunge into the magical world of “The Flying Ship,” which is so hysterically bright that you want to put on dark glasses when watching it. In a palace reminiscent of a ceramic tile salesman’s fever dream, the Tsar (Leonid Yarmolnik) lives with his wayward daughter Zabava. However, not everything is going smoothly for them either: the royal treasury is empty (where the money went is not explained), so the sovereign is completely dependent on the rich man Polkan (Fyodor Dobronravov), who finances the endless renovation of the palace, and also, as it turns out later, bought up all the royal guards .

In response to this, the moneybag expects Zabava to marry his son, who studied abroad for ten years and therefore changed his name Polkan Polkanych to the foreign one Pol (Andrei Burkovsky). But the princess, showing commendable patriotism, falls in love with a simple sailor Vanya (Alexander Metelkin), and he, in order to become a worthy groom for her, goes to the magical forest to find gold. The creation of a flying ship is not his goal at all, but turns out to be an accidental side effect of these searches.

And this is not the only change in the plot familiar from childhood. To turn the 18.5 minutes of the cartoon into a full-length film, the authors came up with, for example, not only Paul, but also a witch named Lady Jane (Polina Gagarina), whom he keeps in a cage, subjugating her magical powers. And the songs of Maxim Dunaevsky, arranged beyond recognition to the poems of Yuri Entin, were diluted with modern musical numbers, if, of course, the compositions “Hop Hey Lala Lay” and “At Dawn” can be considered modern. The first of them is also performed by the Nightingale the Robber (Anna Ukolova), who was absent in the original, and the second by Vanya himself, whom he challenged to a musical duel. Thank you, at least Vodyany (Sergey Garmash) was left with his own song, although it acquired a distinctly chanson sound.

Overall, the film turned out to be loud, unbridledly colorful and strikingly unnatural. The “uncanny valley” effect here is facilitated not only by the abundance of computer graphics, without which not a single scene seems to be complete, but also by other people’s voices singing for the main characters (their songs were voiced by Anna Peresild and rapper Feduk), and the performance of the entire cast, as if he was serving a heavy duty (with the exception, ironically, of Kozlovsky, who was crossed out from the credits; on the contrary, he was playing for five). However, producers probably shouldn’t worry about box office receipts. As Vodyanoy says, describing the tools for building a flying ship: “The tool is domestic, it will smooth out the nuances.”