One dark and stormy night* back in the mid “aughts”, the kids I was babysitting had gone off to bed, and I was flipping channels when I ended up on WHUT. This is the name of Howard University’s public access channel. It is also approximately my reaction to what I saw.
What I saw was a cartoon featuring astronauts who travel to another planet. I saw, and I swear I wasn’t on any weird medication at the time, a long sequence of scenes where objects morphed into one another. Just really strange, psychedelic stuff. I think it mainly involved the flora and fauna of the alien planet. The soundtrack was some kind of musique concréte type stuff if I recall correctly; just bizarre, random sound effects. I watched this for about ten minutes, spellbound, and then…
…it ended. With credits rolling up the screen in Cyrillic, on top of an image of an astronaut floating through a starfield, while, and I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried, John Lennon’s “Imagine” played.
Of course I wanted to know wtf this was, but the info bar for the program just said “Teacher” and didn’t have a description. I’m sure I could have contacted WHUT at the time and found out what it was, but I didn’t think of it at the time and it’s been so long now that I don’t even remember for absolute certain what year I was watching.
I would be extremely grateful if anyone recognized this and could point me in the right direction. And I’m going to go ahead and email WHUT just in case they can help me with this extremely unspecific query.
I’ve never seen this before, so I can’t give you specific help. But, when I was obsessed with a random cartoon I’d seen on PBS (similar to your source, right?) I went on Wikipedia and browsed the pages on short films – Short film - Wikipedia See, if it was shown on US television, it was likely an award winning short, and if you can make some guesses on the year, you can narrow it down. I found Kathedral, Skywhales, and many other long lost short cartoons in this manner.
Thanks for the tip! I don’t think it was a short film though. Also it was on public access television, not PBS - so anyone can show anything they want on it as long as it is in accordance with standards of decency.
Can you try to estimate when the cartoon was made?
There are a ton of Russian films uploaded on YouTube, if you haven’t searched already. I searched for “Russian cartoon space” and found this, but there are a lot of clips whose titles and tags are only in Russian/Cyrillic – I searched for “мультфильм космоса” (“cartoon outer space”) and got 242 hits. Edit: Also try “мультфильм космос”
Sounds a bit like the Bolero segment from Allegro non Troppo, except that it’s Italian, not Russian, and is set to a very recognizable piece of classical music.
I was sure I knew the cartoon the OP was talking about, but having found it, it’s not a match after all. No astronauts, though it does begin with a scene of the moon.
This is very similar in style to what I saw. Do you know anything about this, or can the Russian speakers here transliterate the credits by any chance? I would not be surprised if the creators are the same.
The first credit slide says: [Screenplay] – I. Makcimov (i.e., Maximov), D. Mansurov, B. Dzhusupbekov, K. Konirkul’zhaev
The second slide says: [Director] – I. Maximov / [Artists] – I. Maximov, B. Dzhusupbekov
Doing a Youtube search for “кинорежиссер максимов мультфильм” (director Maximov cartoon) brought up these results.
Wow, thanks so much for the help so far, everybody! It’s awesome having the collective mind all in on this.
So I actually don’t think it’s Maksimov, now that I’ve looked at the various Maksimov stuff on youtube. The cartoon I saw didn’t have this pen-and-ink look to it. The soundtrack and the alien creatures really were almost exactly like the first video Biffy the Elephant Shrew brought up though, so I’m willing to bet that Maksiimov was prominent enough to have inspired similar work.
Also this Bolero video of his is pretty strange and cool, and it’s something I never would have found without this thread.
I can’t help you with your cartoon, but wanted to thank you for the thread. It made me go look once again for a different cartoon I saw on public television.
This time, I found it!! I think one thing that held me back was that I thought it was in black and white, forgetting that my family didn’t have a color tv for a long time.
So, if you have 10 minutes, grab the kids and gather 'round.
I hope you all enjoy a solved personal mystery Self Service.
Now, if I could only remember more details of that one movie I saw so long ago…
I think i found your cartoon…- YouTube
But i was looking for another one…Same Sci Fi but they travel around galaxy to stumble upon some planet where aliens are entering into their ears…Some crazy ass trip happens from that point on…
I’ve been looking for this cartoon for years and years, and this thread gave me enough hints to find it. Everything fits, down to “Imagine” coming on at the end.
Wow, the '70’s in Russia lasted long into the '80s.
It has the flaw of a lot of '70s style animated features in that it makes progressively less sense as it proceeds. It saves itself from didactic idiocy by embracing this and kind of poking fun at the spot its logic has led to. Psychedelic, indeed.
Thank you guys for answering this zombie thread and giving me something unique to watch as my week winds down.
At the most recent Academy Awards, one of the nominees for Best Animated Shorts was “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.” It’s absolutely not what the OP was looking for, but it is an animated Russian film about astronauts (mostly about their training). It’s quite good.
