Dog tack

Belka and Strelka help laughingly part with the socialist past

The dogs Belka and Strelka, who once flew into space, simply had to become movie heroes. They were unique, they managed something, they became symbols. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, like Jeeves and Wooster, like the hammer and sickle after all. It is surprising that the dogs-discoverers of space were awarded a full-length cartoon just now, on the 50th anniversary of their flight.

Cartoon "Squirrel and Strelka. Star Dogs directed by Svyatoslav Ushakov and Inna Evlannikova is a large Russian 3D project. Uncertain 3D only harms the film, but in terms of fascination, the cartoon is quite comparable to Madagascars and Volt. The authors based on real events, but allowed themselves liberties to diversify the plot. It all starts with Squirrel's puppy, Fluffy, given to President Kennedy's daughter, telling American pets the story of how Strelka and her friend Squirrel flew into space in 1960 and returned.

Strelka (with the voice of Elena Yakovleva) is a boorish mongrel who believes that her father is the star Sirius. She lives in the monument "Worker and Collective Farm Girl". Squirrel (Anna Bolshova) is a flirtatious circus dog who sees in every Rorschach blot "a man... a strong man... a man in uniform". As the Megapolis group once sang: “Squirrel is stricter, Squirrel is stronger, Strelka is very pretty.” These young ladies, along with the rat Benjamin (Evgeny Mironov), who got into the Russian film project straight from Pixar's Ratatouille, find themselves at cosmonaut training courses and meet the shepherd instructor Kazbek (Sergey Garmash). Then they fly into space, where they heroically cope with meteor showers and other problems. This is a very blissful movie, everyone here is good, even hooligans and uncles who catch stray dogs: they don’t just catch animals, but for space. But adults also have a place to laugh: for example, the phrase stupid Russian dog is impassively translated as “mysterious Russian soul”.

The Soviet symbols Belka and Strelka in modern cinema are something like guest stars, "star guests", like invited celebrities in the animated series The Simpsons or South Park. Dozens of real-life characters appear on these shows, from real-life self-voiced Paul McCartney and his then-wife Linda (who told Lisa Simpson they were vegetarians) to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama in South Park.

These series take cultural heroes or anti-heroes and make them part of a fictional world, inscribing in their reality both Jesus, who turns out to be a TV presenter in South Park, and Bill Gates. You can do otherwise: take real characters and make them the main characters of an absurd fairy tale like the slobbering "Anastasia" about the daughter of Nicholas II or the vulgar Shrek-like "Trouble in the Himalayas" about the Austrian Empress Elizabeth.

Historical and ideological symbols can be ground into satire or romanticized. Both things happened to Belka and Strelka: a couple of years ago, the series “The Real Adventures of Belka and Strelka” by Toonbox studio began to appear on the Internet, where the dogs ended up in deep space and were forced to wander around different planets to find their way home. “We took these heroes because we knew that it would be the anniversary of the flight of Belka and Strelka,” explains Pavel Muntyan, producer of the series. “The idea came from the comedy club writers, the concept was theirs.”

In this series, both animals are males, Belka is very interested in sex, food and alcohol, and Strelka is neat, intelligent and is not noticed in his addiction to the Sobagon drink. Only a few episodes have been released, and most likely there will be no continuation. Dogs had fun in a space bar with a not very decent name, traveled around a bureaucratic planet and laughed at a creature whose mouth was located not across, but along the face. “Santa Claus does not exist. But vodka exists. Therefore, she is better, ”Belka says in the series.

"Star dogs" are different - they are designed for family viewing, there is not a word about vodka. They deal with the Soviet symbol from a completely different angle. One of the best scenes in the movie is when the dogs go out into outer space to change the battery of the satellite. This is the best commercial break in Russian cinema almost in its entire history: of course, we are talking about a specific battery, but the viewer remembers only the "reboot" of the satellite. With a flashing red star, the satellite re-enters orbit - almost the same thing the filmmakers do with the idea of ​​Soviet space exploration. And in general with the idea of ​​a wonderful Soviet childhood.

The authors of the film surrounded Squirrel and Strelka with animals that vaguely resemble familiar characters: there is a circus lion almost from Boniface's Vacation, a monkey is a close relative of the Monkey from a series of cartoons about the Parrot, Monkey, Elephant and Boa constrictor, there is also a Parrot from the same series. Future cosmonauts are shown the "White Sun of the Desert", and the rat Venya already speaks with quotes from film classics. A crow with cheese, having seen enough of the Ice Age and playing squirrel with a nut, seems superfluous in this big Soviet style, but perhaps the scriptwriters should be blamed here: John Chua and Alexander Talal are graduates of American screenwriting schools, so the share of healthy Hollywood in film is obvious.

But "Star Dogs" is not a story from the same shelf as "Vacation of Boniface" and "38 Parrots". It's rather something in the spirit of the anime "First Squad", where the dead pioneer heroes are fighting with the Nazis. An ideological symbol becomes the protagonist of a fairy tale or parody, and in the process of adventure it becomes humanized and, thus, allows you to rethink the ideology itself.

Approximately the same thing could have happened to Gagarin (the film Gagarin's Grandson, aka Andrei Panin's The Cosmonaut's Grandson), if not for the protest of the real daughters of the non-symbolic Gagarin. The recent "Spirit of Fire" festival in Khanty-Mansiysk screened the Canadian film "Trotsky," in which a high school hero named Leon Bronstein believes he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky and tries to replicate the life of a revolutionary in today's high school. All of this is more or less a successful domestication of ideological symbols, and the Star Dogs do not stray from this trend. Belka and Strelka are truly "guest stars", Soviet guests in today's pop culture.

The director of the cartoon, Svyatoslav Ushakov, says that the authors of Star Dogs did not think about any Soviet propaganda. The film takes place in a Soviet country in 1960, and the Moscow of those years is drawn out carefully, from the monument "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" to the sandboxes and the old metro scheme, where "VDNKh" was the final station. But the adventures of Belka and Strelka, as the creators assure, are, first of all, just a good story.

Ushakov worked on brilliant "pilot" cartoons, including the almanacs "Lift" and the clip of the group "Zero" about a man and a cat. He is also the director of the melancholy cartoon “I used to live by the sea”, the psychotic clip “Haru Mamburu” by the Nogu Svelo group, and the touching nine-minute animated film “Two Italians”. "Belka and Strelka. Star Dogs” is nothing like all of the above. Computer dogs with half-muzzle noses will not evoke tenderness among former Soviet children, just as the “Mittens” and “Bonifaces” of Soviet childhood are unlikely to interest modern children. But the new "Belka and Strelka" is witty, sometimes funny and looks like a circus performance, where the clown quickly juggles symbols from ideology and pop culture, each time managing to catch the sickle by the handle. Ideology, sit! Give me a paw.