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JERRY BECK
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Alice’s Birthday
by jerry
October 21, 2008 12:05 am


The footage in this promo reel looks like a lot of fun to me.

All I know about this Russian Flash animated feature is what’s published on Wikipedia:

Alice’s Birthday, is an upcoming 2009 Russian flash-animated feature film directed by Sergey Seryogin and being made by the studio “MASTER-FILM”. It is based on one of a series of stories by well-known writer Kir Bulychyov about Alisa (Alice) Seleznyova, a young girl living in the second half of the 21st century.

I just hope it garners a U.S. release.

(Thanks, Tim Tweidelman)

10/21/08  9:32am

That looks beautiful.

10/21/08  11:05am
Aleksandar Vujovic says:

That’s awesome! I don’t remember being more captivated by an animated commercial/trailer in a LONG TIME! It’s so crazy, so diferrent! Man, Russia only keep proving how amazing their whole history of animation has been and continues to be.

Even if there won’t be a US release, I’m sure the film will be still available in Russian with English subtitles, I think. (Sorry, but American dubbing hasn’t really done justice to just about every Miyazaki film I’ve seen.)

10/21/08  11:16am
Rudolf says:

This will be a better flick than the currently filming Tim Burton reimagined take on the same story.

10/21/08  12:30pm
AdrianC says:

If this was done in Flash, that’s pretty cool because it doesn’t look like it.

10/21/08  12:39pm
Mike Milo says:

The main character reminds of Marv Newland’s Anijam from way back in ‘84!

10/21/08  1:21pm

This looks nice. I kept waiting for the Loc-Nar to show up.

10/21/08  3:10pm
Brannigan's Law says:

I’m guessing this won’t be seeing American theaters unless they are planning on adding a realistic, cg talking animal or a poorly mocap’d human.

10/21/08  3:23pm
Nugent says:

Parts of the song sound influenced by the Beatles “Nowhere Man.” They were bootlegged for years over there.

10/21/08  3:37pm
bob says:

looks like a peace of crap.

10/21/08  4:31pm
tim! says:

i am so excited for this!!!!

it looks like my memories of children’s books!!!! so goood!

10/21/08  4:41pm
Alex says:

I like the look of it!

10/22/08  9:02am

Post-apocaliptic world and funny aliens. I’m intrigued! :-)

10/23/08  9:44pm
Anna says:

Kir Bulychyov animated? I’m automatically sold *loves his books*

10/23/08  10:40pm
jrsmith says:

This would be at least the second animated film based on Kir Bulychyov’s Alice stories. The earlier film being the 1981 Mystery of the Third Planet, which the brew posted about a while ago: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/the-mystery-of-the-third-planet

10/24/08  3:07am
Esn says:

jrsmith:

Indeed, that 1981 film is one of the all-time Russian animation classics. I’m sure that every Russian has seen it. A subtitled version can be seen on Youtube here:

Regarding “Alice’s Birthday”, the interesting thing is that the reaction of Russians to it (including the people who worked on it) has been a lot more critical than the very nice comments here. There’s a fairly lengthy discussion on the prodisney.ru forums (one of the main Russian-language forums discussing domestic animation, despite the name) which some of you may be interested in reading with the help of Google’s Translator:
http://prodisney.ru/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3224&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

On the one hand, some positive words have been said about the harmony of the visual style, which in the words of the admin “evoke late Soviet-era children’s book illustrations”. And apparently the initial scenario was actually a very good one. On the other hand, the director decided to make the actual scenes before the montage was decided upon (the live-action film method) with the result that, in a version 75%-complete, the separate scenes often do not work together and critical portions of the script are cut out to make room for songs (this according to A. Yevseyeva).

The general attitude now seems to be “wait and see”. There’s not a lot of time left to wait.

By the way, I think that the particular trailer posted on Cartoon Brew is a pretty horrible one (horribly edited, that is). This one is much nicer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkY2xsoEbWA

10/24/08  3:10am
Esn says:

Whoops, I forgot to post the Youtube link for the 1981 film. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QrtKAKc9Xs

There are also some videos of the 1990s American English-dubbed version of the film. Do not watch them, they are horrible! They changed the music and completely changed the whole character of the film!

10/24/08  7:16am
Esn says:

Also, in reply to Rudolf:
Burton’s movie is based on the 19th-century English novel, while Seryogin’s is based on a 20th-century Russian one. Not everyone named “Alice” is “Alice in Wonderland”.

10/28/08  10:01am
warmowski says:

Can that really be Flash?!

Ah. The Wikipedia page is updated to read “some scenes were done in Flash”

10/30/08  7:24pm
Esn says:

Yeah, that was my bad about the “Flash” thing. Don’t trust Wikipedia, blog-writers, it’s written by random people like me who get things wrong. :)

The info about “some scenes” being done in Flash comes from A. Yevseyeva (from Revival Studio) who did some work on the film. She says:
“Three episodes were done in Flash, one of which was thrown out :o), another was shortened by half, and the third was half-redone a year after it was finished.
Everything else was done on paper.”

I didn’t use that quote as the source for Wikipedia, though; instead I used an old interview with the director where he talks about working with Flash a little.

02/25/09  8:30pm
Esn says:

Some news about its premiere and how well it did, as well as a translated interview with the director and producer (click the link on my name).

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