“Yaga and the Book of Spells”: stupa of rage

by time news

2023-04-28 00:41:31

All fairy families are unhappy in the same way. Princess Sineglazka immediately disliked her stepmother – and for good reason. Belladonna is a real witch. And why are kings always so frivolous – marrying women with poisonous names?

First, Belladonna poisoned the queen and took her place, and now she is slowly poisoning the king himself in order to rule alone. Sineglazka does not sit idly by and sets off on a long journey to the Kingdom of Far Far Away. There, according to rumors, an apple tree grows, the fruits of which treat any ailment. And Belladonna needs only that – you never know what can happen to the princess on the road, and the poison will not have to be transferred. Fortunately, Sineglazka meets along the way not just anyone, but Baba Yaga. Yes, not simple, but young and not at all evil. Rather eccentric.

The cartoon “Yaga and the Book of Spells” has a long and extremely curious biography. Surprisingly, the project was initiated at the beginning of the last decade by the French studio Herold and Family, known for the feature films True Story of Puss in Boots (2009) and Cinderella: Full Speed ​​Ahead! (2012). And all thanks to the enthusiasm of one particular person – the director and screenwriter Dan Kreter, who got the idea to make a film about the main villain of Slavic folklore.

The French were looking for partners and entered the Russian company Art Pictures. “We have read the script. And we didn’t like it terribly,” producer Fyodor Bondarchuk honestly admitted at the Yaga pitching (at the very first open defense of the Cinema Fund’s projects in 2013). Art Pictures agreed to participate only on the condition that a Russian co-author, a Russian co-director would be involved in the work, and the characters would be finalized and cleared of obvious “cranberries”.

/Bazelevs Production

And now, 10 years later, the cartoon finally reached the rental – however, without the French (that company managed to go bankrupt, and Kreter managed to make the series “Tara Duncan” for Disney). But with a Russian partner, Glucose Production, with which Art Pictures has already released a joint animated feature film Savva. Warrior’s Heart (2015). The director was a native of the studio “Pilot” Vladimir Sakov (“Elka”). By the way, towards the end, there were also some adventures – Yaga was supposed to be the first release of the new distributor NMG Film Distribution (part of the National Media Group holding) and be released on the eve of the New Year’s Battle in 2023. But due to sanctions and the overall workload of supercomputers on the market, the picture was not rendered by the deadline, so the date had to be shifted to April.

The bone leg has long crossed the boundaries of folklore and replenished the bestiary of Western pop culture. Among other things, Yaga is the main antagonist in the latest Hellboy (2019), and in her honor was nicknamed the unkillable John Wick from the franchise of the same name. Judging by the synopsis of the original idea, Kreter dreamed of continuing the series of on-screen atrocities of the old woman, while the final Yaga offers a serious rebranding of the image according to the formula already tested by Shrek: the traditional villain becomes the protagonist.

Yaga is still the same enchantress and lives in a hut on chicken legs. But she is young, beautiful, with a shock of luxurious red hair (a little Merida from Brave – and a little Esmeralda from Notre Dame de Paris). She doesn’t eat children – she sits on porridge and is generally a positive girl in every sense. And the fact that she is unsociable and lives more often is only because at one time she was very disappointed in people. Only the Soyuzmultfilm classic Valery Ugarov updated Yaga more radically in his latest film Grandmother Ezhka and Others (2006) – there she is just a forest hippie girl in a green T-shirt.

Like all Russian 3D animation, “Yaga” was filmed with an eye to international distribution – it is read on the lips: the lipsing of the characters immediately reveals that the lines were originally recorded in English. It is no coincidence that one of the screenwriters is the American Gregory Poirier, whose filmography includes both The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The drama is simple, familiar, international – the daughter will make friends on the journey and save her father, and the unsociable Yaga will open up to people and believe in herself. Everything is schematic, predictable, but cheerful, sometimes funny and almost always very beautiful, especially the underwater world.

The very design of the world as a whole is “average”: fabulous retro-futurism in the scenery of the Western European Middle Ages. Although there is a lot of “Russian spirit”: the mentioned hut on chicken legs runs through the forests, and the fortress walls of the capital city are inspired by the Moscow Kremlin.

The roles of the characters are again easily recognizable. Both the main characters and the secondary ones: the brownies-bumps resemble stupid minions from Despicable Me, and the slightly bad goat Burka is a distant relative of the Donkey from Shrek and the horse Yuli from the cartoon Bogatyrs. But the psychological nuances of the characters, their facial expressions and gestures are an order of magnitude richer than the average industrial indicators.

Yaga was especially successful, of course (she was voiced by Yulia Khlynina from “Call DiCaprio!”), As well as Leshy, a gnarled old man who is embarrassed by his wooden bald head. He speaks in the voice of Fyodor Bondarchuk (“Sputnik”, “Ghost”), but it is absolutely impossible to recognize him.

Will there be a sequel to the cartoon – will show fees. But the screen life of the fairy-tale witch, apparently, will continue in any case. For example, producer Alexei Uchitel (Matilda, Streltsov) is already developing a game fantasy Young Yaga from the director of Tanks Kim Druzhinin.

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