The Well-Loved Hated Film

Welcome! This is another Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, all about a Soviet cartoon.

It was one of the biggest ever released in the USSR. The film went way past its team’s expectations. There was a torrent of fan mail, and even the songs from its soundtrack “quickly became hits,” selling in massive quantities.1

The Bremen Town Musicians (1969) is the piece in question. It’s an animated musical — reportedly the USSR’s first.2 The country’s other cartoons weren’t much like it back then. It put contemporary music and Western fashion and dances, and the hot-and-saturated psychedelic colors of the late ‘60s, all across Soviet screens.

Whether in theaters or on television, or on record, people couldn’t get enough. And the audience wasn’t limited to children. Soviet teenagers, who often outgrew animation, were “the majority of the viewers and fans of The Bremen Town Musicians,” explained the film’s director, Inessa Kovalevskaya. The Union’s more countercultural people were, likewise, unusually drawn to this thing.3

Still, there were detractors. Among them: many of Kovalevskaya’s own co-workers at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow.

“After The Bremen Town Musicians, I was virtually kicked out of the studio,” she recalled. “And the management and my colleagues said that this was an awful film.”4

The controversy began pre-release. When the finished project went before Soyuzmultfilm’s Artistic Council for feedback and censorship, top directors like Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Fyodor Khitruk criticized it (the latter strongly opposed it). A member of the film’s team has claimed that one attendee, composer Rostislav Boyko, dismissed The Bremen Town Musicians as “marijuana for children.”5

Others on the council intervened to save the film, but Kovalevskaya’s problems weren’t over. Her piece tended to provoke strong reactions. In fact, it was designed to do so.