Review of the film fairy tale by Alexander Voitinsky “At the Command of the Pike”

Alexander Voitinsky’s “fairytale blockbuster” “At the Pike’s Command” has been released, one of the first in a series of fairy tale films that Russian audiences will expect in the next two years. Tells Julia Shagelman.

The last time the story about the lazy Emelya, a wish-granting talking pike, a mobile stove and courtship with the Tsar’s daughter was filmed by the classic Soviet film fairy tale Alexander Rowe was in 1938. However, it seems that a new fairy-tale era is dawning in Russian cinema. “Cheburashka,” released on January 1 of this year, inspired distributors with its phenomenal box office receipts and even gave grounds for optimistic statements by industry representatives that Russian cinemas would somehow survive the departure of the Hollywood majors with their blockbusters. In the summer, “Baba Yaga Saves the World” was released on a smaller scale, of course, but quite successfully, and “The Pike’s Command” will soon be followed by “The Bremen Town Musicians”, “The Flying Ship”, “The Wizard of the Emerald City”, “Ruslan and Lyudmila” , “Flint” from the same team that has now brought Emelya to the screens again, another version of the same plot – “Flint versus the Magic Well” and at least a dozen more fairy-tale films.

The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it: this genre is willingly supported with money by both the state and private film companies (children are sacred), people go to screenings, especially on holidays and holidays, with their families, which means they willingly spend money, besides , as in Soviet times, one can hide references to modernity expressed in Aesopian language in the plots and at the same time feel relatively safe from the close attention of supervisory authorities. This is a fairy tale, so by definition there cannot be any “dangerous” topics here.

“At the Command of the Pike,” however, is a purely patriotic work. The local Russian lands are ruled by a tsar – a strong business executive (Roman Madyanov), who made his own wooden crown with his own hands and restores order in the capital; Emelya (Nikita Kologrivy) will not fail to notice out loud how prettier she has become. The Tsar supports the domestic manufacturer in everything, and therefore is very dissatisfied with the sympathy of his daughter Anfisa (Alina Alekseeva) for some reason specifically with the British, and not with the vaguely “overseas” ambassador, Lord Rothman (Yuri Kolokolnikov). He constantly seduces the princess with foreign mechanical wonders, which irritates the king, who is lagging behind in the technology race, even more.

This is where Emelya comes in handy, having managed to conclude a pact with a magical pike who can turn into the maiden Vasilisa (Mila Ershova) and promised him the fulfillment of three wishes in exchange for freedom. Having mediocrely squandered two of them, Emelya decides to save the third and win the heart of the royal daughter, whom he has had his eye on for a long time, on his own. However, Vasilisa’s help will still be useful to him: after all, Anfisa, trying to destroy the unwanted groom, comes up with one impossible task for him after another. The Tsar Father also supports his daughter in order to satisfy the hated ambassador with the miracles Emelya found.

First, our hero gets hold of a self-playing button accordion, for which he has to outwit the computer cat Bayun, who speaks in the voice of Sergei Burunov. Then he takes away the self-assembled tablecloth from the heroes Eating and Drinking. And then he goes to the kingdom of Koshchei (Fedor Lavrov) to receive a blessing for marriage with Anfisa from her late and very bad mother (Agrippina Steklova). In all these adventures he is accompanied and rescued from them by the faithful Vasilisa, who, for unknown reasons, fell in love with Emelya, who can hardly be called not only a good guy, but at least charming.

This last plot is perhaps even too realistic for a children’s fairy tale, although it will only be understandable to viewers of both sexes who have accumulated some life experience. Children, most likely, will really enjoy the furnace running wildly across the fields, the fluffy talking cat (much cuter, despite the bad character at first, than the main character) and the funny antics of the king and the ambassador. As it should be in fairy tales, there is also room for morality: by the end, Emelya still ceases to be a lazy egocentric, receiving a happy ending for himself and Vasilisa as a reward. True, the fate of the princess, who simply did not want to marry a complete stranger, turns out to be quite sad, but it is too early for audiences 6+ to think about this, as well as about the problems of import substitution in the fairy-tale kingdom-state.