Russian animation: Norshteyn’s “Good Night, Children” sequence

A higher-resolution video (recommended!) of the 2nd half can be downloaded here: www.mediafire.com And the first half can be found here: www.mediafire.com I used those two video sources to make this file, and removed the watermarks. Credit for finding part 1 goes to ElmoSP. However, this version might still be missing about 25 seconds (actually, those 25 seconds are probably just the credits). Norshteyn spent a year and a half making this animation for the introduction/conclusion to Good Night, Children (Спокойной ночи, малыши), a popular Russian nightly show for young children to watch before they go to bed. The first part would air before each daily show, the second part after. The segment accompanied the show for a while in 2000, and was taken off the air in summer of 2001; the show moved to another channel while the copyright for the sequence stayed with the old one. It was 81st on a list of the 150 best animated films ever made voted on by 140 animation professionals in Japan in 2003: niffiwan.livejournal.com However, the reactions of Russian audiences were largely negative; program director Valentina Prasolova said: “Norshteyn is a famous artist, but he does not make good opening/closing sequences. We get calls and letters every day about this sequence from people who tell us that it is terrible, that it is dark, that children do not want to watch our program.” www.gazeta.ru Full credits here: animator.ru The art direction was done by Valentin Olshvang, rather than …
Video Rating: 4 / 5