The Disobedient Kitten

Neposlušnyj kotënok is, at a first glance, an innocent exemplary tale with a simple moral: little ones should obey and stay home with the grown-ups. Yet, this one-reeler caused a stir among filmmakers and is justly considered as much a breakthrough in animation. For the first time in twenty years animated animals had no contours. This brought a sense of volume, a sense of real texture (something Soviet animation would stake on a decade later). It brought back the long-lost stylization. Animators themselves united all these features into a single term – ‘fluffiness’ (pušistost’). Silly as it may seem, it was precisely this twist from false realism to ‘fluffiness’ that blazed a trail to the famous Soviet avant-garde animation of the 1960s-1970s, resulting in the masterpieces of Fëdor Chitruk and Jurij Norštein.