That looks beautiful.

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.)

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

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

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

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

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.

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

looks like a peace of crap.

i am so excited for this!!!!

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

I like the look of it!

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

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

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

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

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!

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”.

Can that really be Flash?!

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

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.

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).