Movie premiere

This past weekend I attended a movie premiere: the first presentation in Russia of a new film starring Cheburashka.  He's a short bear-like character whose fame rests on 4 stop-motion animation films, with a combined running time under 1 hour. The last film was made almost 30 years ago, so the appearance of a new film is something of a big deal. You can watch the old films (with English subtitles) here.

Cheburashka first appeared in a book by Eduard Uspensky, and was not exactly a runaway hit. What really made Cheburashka popular were the films which came after the book (a counterexample to the idea that a movie is never as good as the book it is based on). To bring the characters of the book to life, the chief animator Leonid Shvartsman had the idea to give Cheburashka very large ears, which became Cheburashka's signature feature.

Cheburashka's back story is that he's from Africa and wound up falling asleep in an orange crate that was shipped to the USSR. As soon as he was unpacked and fell out, he started speaking Russian immediately.  In my experience, that is not a very realistic way of learning Russian.

Cheburashka has a friend Gena (the G is pronounced as in Good, not Gene), who is a crocodile with a job as a crocodile in a zoo (nice gig) and he likes to play the garmoshka, which is a Russian accordion. In the old Cheburashka films Gena sings what have become two very famous melancholy songs, one of them bemoaning the fact that birthdays come only once a year. The first and fourth of the original Cheburashka films exhibit a strong contradiction: in the first film Cheburashka finds Gena by reading an ad that Gena has posted around town, but in the fourth film it turns out Cheburashka can't read. Somehow I was able to watch both of those films without my head exploding.

Nowadays you can find Cheburashka all over the place.  Here are two of them in the window of a clothing store, which was in fact Cheburashka's (unseen) job in the first film: stand in a store window to attract customers.

Here are two flashdrives with a Cheburashka cover (I think you take off the head to get the flash drive):

The prices on these are really incredible: 1 US dollar = 30 rubles, so the 1200 ruble 4GB flash drive on the right is 40 US dollars!! Actually, most hi-tech equipment in Russia costs a lot more than elsewhere, perhaps due to import taxes.  As another example, before my trip someone in Moscow asked me if I could bring a Playstation with me (I am not kidding) because its price in Russia was something like 100 US dollars more than the price in America. I was also approached about bringing an iPad. For various reasons I did not bring either of those with me.

About 10 years ago the old Cheburashka films were shown in Japan and the people there went absolutely bonkers over this character, who at least has more content than Hello Kitty, who as far as I can tell never actually does anything.  Some Japanese animators had the idea that they wanted to make some new Cheburashka films, and they received permission from Uspensky.  A team of Japanese, South Korean, and Russian filmmakers did a shot-by-shot remake of the first film and then created two completely new films.  They were all put together and form an 80 minute feature. Cinematic details are available on the Internet Movie Database.

The new film was first shown at the Cannes film festival in 2009, with an unclear general release date. It showed up in Moscow over the weekend as part of the 44th annual Japanese film festival.  Here I am in front of a promotional poster (in the new film Cheburashka and Gena try out for the circus, which explains the juggling):

Inside the theater (which had fantastic stadium-style seating) the screen before the start of the film had a still shot of all the characters in front of a circus tent:

The microphones you see on the stage were used later at the introduction before the film started.

In the next picture you can see some of the press taking pictures or video of the audience and the dignitaries (voice actors, director, et al.) in the front row.  I was sitting somewhere in the middle rows, off to the side, but maybe I wound up in some shot on Russian TV.

The four people on stage below in front of the screen are (left to right), the director, the girl who voiced Cheburashka for the Japanese version, the woman who voiced Cheburashka for the Russian version, and a Russian animator. The Japanese barely spoke Russian (the director spoke a few words of it from a card), but there was a translator on stage too.

In the row behind me some journalists interviewed two kids:

The boy basically looked into the camera with a forced smile the whole time and the girl answered questions with "yes" or "no" after giving some real thought to everything she was asked.  Of course they had no idea about the history of the whole thing.

I considered taking some pictures of the movie as it was running, but I wasn't sure if my camera flash might go off by mistake, and that would've annoyed people in the theater.  Besides, the moving image on the screen would probably have come out blurry.  You can see some scenes of the new movie in a making-of clip that is available here in large screen mode (click on the leftmost button to start) and here on Youtube.

I learned only today, a day after seeing the film, that there was a press conference with the new director and voice actors after the film was over.  In retrospect I should've guessed that (it was a premiere, after all).  Most surprisingly, it did not seem that the author, animator, or voice actors behind the original Cheburashka films were in attendance.  Well, the original voice of Cheburashka passed away 6 years ago, so that absence made sense, but Uspensky, Shvartsman, and the original voice of Gena are very much alive.

How was the movie?  Since it was in Russian, the fact that I simply understood what was going on gives it an A+ in my book.  (The Japanese subtitles were not very helpful.)  Actually, I thought the second of the two new stories had a strange aspect: its title refers to something in the story which really did not play an essential part.  You'll have to watch the movie to understand that.  I wouldn't be surprised if illegal DVD copies of the film are already on sale somewhere in Moscow.