For anyone familiar with the history of Russian animation...

For anyone familiar with the history of Russian animation, when would you say was its high point and did the regime had anything to do with it? I heard Gorbachev had a less stricter regime than Stalin, but did affect the quality?

I like Russian Winnie the Pooh and Nu Pogadi.

From my rudimentary knowledge of Russian animation, there was lots of government subsidies and grants given to propaganda efforts, including animation, so the quality was high quality.

Stalin was more weighted towards propaganda, but the next leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev was much more humane and gave people freedom of expression.
With that in mind, both of them gave rise to prosperous animation industries.

Earlier works were happier and more loving of Russia, due to Stalin's heavy propaganda efforts, while later stuff is where we see the more modern existential and depressing work that came out after people were allowed to speak out against the government without the death squads being immediately sent out.

As for Gorbachev, I don't really know much about the late USSR, but what I do know is that he wasn't terribly into giving out shekels to people, and his reign is when the animation studios started drying up.

Fuck, it was Khrushchev not Gorbachev.

Also was there any knowledge on how the animators felt during the Krushchev era. I mean, they have more freedom of expression and the government is basically paying for their shorts, so I understand they'd be more satisfied than the Stalin era. But was the budget still limited? Did they still had limits?

Keep in mind I'm not fluent in Snowrunes so my knowledge is second or third-hand and been tossed around by various historians.

The subsidies weren't huge compared to what American/Japanese/French/Italian/Korean animation studios had, but they were fairly large sums to the average Russian.
Remember, communism fucked up wages, so everyone was living on a very similar shitty amount of cash. The large sums of money coming in to animation (again, large relative to their low incomes) meant that animators would make incredibly high quality works so that they could keep the money flowing from the Moscow Kremlin.

As you've gathered, this money was being siphoned off to support their family/community.
Side note that I find interesting: Communist Russia, and I guess still to this day but not as intensely, was very isolated geographically, so people in a town would take care of each other. In fact, many older people see wealth in Russia as evil and prefer everyone to be equal in poverty. I guess famine is one way to strengthen community spirit.
Obviously, if they were found to be spending this money on anything but supplies and manpower necessary to produce the animated works, they'd be in lots of trouble, or gulags. Usually gulags.
Thus, they produce very good works as cheaply as they can manage so the work impresses the people in charge of the rubles.

Back to the freedom of expression, they were happier during the period of de-Stalinisation that Khrushchev brought about in terms of day to day life, but they still used animation and film to talk about the pain and despair they had endured up to that point. Lots of the most bleak and depressing works to come out of Russia were from the period when they were getting happier.
Once Gorbachev came in, they got a bit too happy and the works died down, also in part to his removal of lots of monetary aid.
Then shitty cyka Gopnik style came in, which isn't very exciting to me, so I don't know much about it.

Oh, and keep in mind, Khrushchev and Gorbachev weren't angels sent from the Heavens and were pretty shit to the populace, but they were much better relative to Stalin, so patriotism and morale was very high.

Slavs are just like that, man. Existential and depressing has been the trademark of their stories since at least the early 1700's.

Ya think?

"There Will Come Soft Rains" - Budet Laskovyj Dozhd

I meant that we see those themes present in animation.
It was common in books as they were harder to police than animated films in a theatre, so Stalin's boys were able to better restrict them.


Why?

Are you retarded or something?

Yup. Struggling to think of why you'd go to the effort, albeit minor, to do this when YouTube doesn't count views through embeds and you're still giving out the same data, just to a random stranger instead of Google.

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Webm please.

They will look up and shout "Webm please"
And I will look down and whisper "lol".

Good shit.


No reason to webm it.
I don't get the autistic screeching behind hooktube and webms for demonetised videos or monetised videos from a proper creator.

Fuck youtube, that's pretty much it, plus hooktube offers multiple options to save or modify a video with ease though compression is still iffy. There are better ways to support creators other than youtbe, its basically became an archive site now. You can't make money on the platform anymore (especially if you're an animator) due to their viewership and subscription requirements, so why support a platform that's constantly shooting itself in the foot. Hell say what you will about pateron but if you bitch at them long enough they actually reverse shit.

God forbid he wants a webm to save for later posting in case youtube ever takes it down like they're known for doing.
Fucking faggots.

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Thanks man.

Cheers user

I remember the Russian version of Winnie the Pooh.

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Well I'm impressed.

Odd, the art is good but the animation is Betty Boop-tier

Generally political situation affected cartoons positively back in the day.
Censorship existed, but you know, not everyone want a fucking politics in their cartoons. They had some general quality controls.
And I am pretty sure they filmed a lot of weird shit in not russian parts of ussr.

I'm sorry Octobriana turned out to be a literary hoax. She would have made one hell of a cartoon.

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Webm please.

It obviously was 70-80 era (even mid 60s-80) when "Soyuzmultfilm" considered the largest animation studio in Europe. Almost all my favorites home cartoons produced around this years.

That was fucking cool. Thanks user

Based on an old story by Ray Bradbury.
There's audiobooks of the original being read by Leonard Nimoy and Burgess Meredith…

Soviet Toys is made by a famous director. Forgot which.

Before Soyuzmultfilm - weird-ass badly animated propaganda cartoons.
Stalin's era - Soyuzmultfilm was created with the goal to have a domestic Disney. Good traditional animation, but plots and voices are rather generic.
Khruschev-Brezhnev's era - animation became simple and more stylized, sometimes very experimental (especially in "adult cartoons"). Cartoons are generally more laid-back and humorous, not counting aforementioned "adult cartoons" that often got dark and philosophical. Popular movie actors with distinctive voices often used as VAs. Can be considered a golden age.
Perestroika era - censorship went away, so did quality control, so everyone was trying to out-edge each other, similar to Dark Age of Comics in USA. Some gems shine through anyway.
90's - Soyuzmultfilm collapsed, not much of quality cartoons were made otherwise. Still lots of edgy stuff. Sequels of Soviet-era cartoons are made through 90's and 00's, and they are so shitty it's easier to pretend they don't exist.
00's - one extremely good animated series (Smeshariki), some animated movies by Melnitsa, which were kinda okay if you can look past the whole "From the producers who saw Shrek" feeling.
10's - Smeshariki went 3D (with loss of quality), some generic, but wholesome kiddie stuff is made (Masha and the Bear), Melnitsa doing endless rehashes, Soyuzmultfilm is struggling to become relevant again, some new studios are trying to emerge. Government is trying to subsidize the Russian animation, except they don't have any quality control and the whole thing is used to embezzle money, leading to some truly horrifying results such as "Kids versus Wizards".


Yeah, nah, that's wrong. Scientists and people of art were considered the part of the elites, and they generally had cushier living. They were also eligible for various monetary awards (Stalin's Award, later replaced by State Award, Lenin's Award). It was not unheard for some high-profile scientists and actors to own limousines.

You want slav animation?
You can't handle the slav animation!
No webm because it's 2long, and no hooktube because of subs.

Newfags don't know, oldfags forgot.
Good thing (((Kuvaev))) lost the intellectual rights, Masyanya revival was really shitty

Yeah, I used to be sad that Magazinchik has died, but I see now that it managed to not have a single bad episode. It's sad, but I'm still happy for what we got.