One Day Before Our Era

A poetic view of Russian animation and of cultural and social transformations Russian society has been gone through. It is about multi faceted and humorous animation, almost never exposed to western eyes.

A cartoon about beavers whose school pike was stolen one day during a lesson. And so the little beaver detectives follow the trail of the kidnapper.

The third film of the biographical cycle based on Pushkin's drawings and texts.

A little hedgehog, on the way to visit his friend the bear, gets lost in thick fog, where horses, dogs and even falling leaves take on a terrifying new aspect...

Distant, well-worn memories of childhood are inhabited by a little gray wolf. Through astonishing imagery, the memory of all of Russia is depicted.

Second animation about Gena and Cheburashka. Cheburashka wishes Gena the Crocodile a happy birthday and gives him a toy helicopter as a gift. After meeting some pioneers, they decide to be pioneers themselves. They build a playground for the local children and collect scrap metal, after which they become pioneers.

Gena the Crocodile and Cheburashka decide to go to the sea on vacation. Shapoklyak steals their train tickets, so they are kicked off the train. On their way home, the duo, with Shapoklyak's help, stops hikers from poaching and a factory from polluting a river.

Animated short about a love between a heron and a crane.

The film is based on the drawings and manuscripts of A.S.Pushkin.

A 1981 documentary film directed by Yuri Ozerov. It showed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow. The director was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1982. The film was selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 54th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

A cut-out animation warning for children about the danger of fire and playing with matches, far from the grim warning of your typical PSA and anticipating the complicated human psychology of Norshteyn's subsequent work. And, no doubt, there is a metaphor aimed at the power structure. 1968-69 was a crucial period of transition for the animator, breaking out of the pack at Soyuzmultfilm and beginning to script and co-direct films. Not listed on imdb, this is one - if not the first - of his first solo works as director.

Hare enlists four brave friends to help him reclaim his home from the wily Fox.

The story is based on the legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which disappears under the waters of a lake to escape an attack by the Mongols.

Surprising master Lefty, who grounded a steel flea. This feature-length cutout-animated film from the Soviet Union is based on the story of the same name by the 19th century Russian novelist Nikolai Leskov. It was directed by the "Patriarch of Soviet animation", Ivan Ivanov-Vano, at the Soyuzmult film studio.

An animated film based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names in animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).