Patriotic parents can breathe a sigh of relief, quit complaining about violent western cartoons and finally turn on a Ukrainian cartoon for their child – actually almost any Ukrainian produced cartoon from 1961 onward.
Ukranimafilm
animation studio has created a YouTube channel specially focused on Ukrainian
cartoons. The online catalogue includes more than a hundred cartoons. The
most famous ones are: When Cossacks… , Capitan Vrungel, About Petryk
Pyatochkin, Alice in the Wonderland and Kotygoroshko.
Ukranimafilm
representative Nataliya Nagovitsyna is excited about the new online channel.
“We still actively sell cartoons to TV channels, but it is just stupid not to
use the most convenient platform for our audience (the internet). Besides that,
our cartoons are fantastic and we sincerely want to share them with people,”
she explained.
However, Ukrainian
cartoons do not necessarily mean Ukrainian-language cartoons. “All the cartoons
in Soviet times were produced in both Russian and Ukrainian languages, but due
to problems connected with the Soviet reality many of Ukrainian language copies
were lost,” Nagovitsyna says. Of 383 cartoons available in the Ukranimafilm
film collection, only 101 are Ukrainian-language productions. Some cartoons are
mute.
According
to Nagovitsyna, most of the cartoons in the collection need pricey reconstruction,
which can’t be done all at once, but the animation studio is working diligently
on them, she explains. “We plan to add both more old and new cartoons, as well
as feature animation films,” she says.
Now the
studio is working on a modernized animation story about Kotygoroshko, a
Ukrainian folk hero, a humorous feature-length cartoon called Babai and even a new
season of one of Ukraine’s most famous cartoons about the adventures of
Ukrainian Cossacks. “We already have state support for the first three episodes
and are pretty sure that we can get more money from other sources for the rest
of the season,” Nagovitsyna says. After being screened in Ukraine’s cinemas and
on TV the cartoons will be added to the YouTube collection.
“Now we are
trying to make the channel more convenient, divide the cartoons into sections
for children of different ages and translate the comments under videos into
Ukrainian. They will be in as many languages as we can manage to translate them
into,” she explains.
The adress of the channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/ukranima
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
