i wonder if any of this animation can be attributed to Peter Foldes.

“There’s no use”? Come, now. This is a musical in which a detective attempts to solve the mystery of Blue Beard (from the famous folk tale). Eventually he finds Blue Beard, who admits to all the murders of his wives, but asks the detective to listen to HIS side of the story. He then lists all of his wives in turn and what happened.

Just because you don’t know a language is no reason to say that a film is incomprehensible.

Incidentally, here’s the animator.ru profile of this film:
http://animator.ru/db/?ver=eng&p=show_film&fid=5209

It was directed by Vladimir Samsonov. Another thing that Samsonov is known for (although not very well, even Russia) is directing dozens of paint-on-glass-animated short poems.

I wrote about it in “Animatsiya in English” early this month:
http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/8190.html

I came across this one while looking for soviet animation on YouTube. For anyone interested there’s a lot of subtitled shorts on, check out Nifiwan’s channel, he put subtitles to soviet shorts. He used to have more, but some are wonderful, check out “laziness” and “The tree and the cat”: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=Niffiwan

Just as I write my comment, Niffiwan post right here … :D

personally, I grew up with this cartoon and LOVE IT!
…and the fact Blue Beard is voiced by my fav actor/singer also helps ^___^

Everyone should totally check out “следствие ведут колобки” too (err… english title..um.. Investigation held by Kolobki?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YIVpLDOSQ

Anna, there’s a version of that film subtitled in English too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scve7JbhbH4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHwnKmQJw8

Although I translated the title as “The Koloboks Investigate”. (”kolobki” is plural for “kolobok”)

It’s one of my favourite funny Russian films.

Actually, I’ve just written english subtitles for the Blue Beard cartoon and uploaded them to youtube earlier this week, so if check it out, if you are still interested. It’s obviously not as good as the original text, but that goes for most things in this world anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vStskni1s2U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQyJUeQLJHE