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Here’s Krokodil Gena’s famous birthday song
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Here’s another of Shainsky’s sweet songs…
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Today, friends and relatives will pay last respects to the late Russian and Soviet composer V Ya Shainsky before his burial later today at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in western Moscow. Widely known in the world of animation as the composer of the soundtrack for the famous Soviet cartoon series about Cheburashka and Krokodil Gena, Shainsky died at the age of 92 in San Diego CA USA on 25 December 2017. The Ministry of Culture quoted Deputy Minister A V Zhuravsky:
Due to the lengthy holidays, his relatives in the USA were unable to promptly obtain documents verifying his death. Moreover, relevant documents were also required to obtain permission for taking the body from the USA, and that required time.
Shainsky excelled in writing songs and music for children, marked by unpretentious but catchy tunes that very often enticed a child to sing along. He scored stunning success in composing songs for movies, and the multifilms about Cheburashka and Krokodil Gena, which now have versions in languages as different as Hebrew and Japanese, offer a shining example of it. Kid’s music wasn’t the only popular part of his output. Some of his songs for grownup audiences, like A Soldier’s Walking through the Town, surprisingly spilt over Russia’s borders. Shainsky lived in San Diego since 2007.
22 January 2018
TASS
Voices from Russia 
24 June 2016. Leopold the Cat on the Unity of Holy Rus
Tags: Animated cartoon, animation, History of Russian animation, Leopold the Cat, multifilms, national character, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Soviet Union, translation, USSR
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Leopold the Cat is one of the most beloved Sov-era multifilm characters. He’s as much a part of Russian visual culture as Taz and Bugs Bunny are in the USA. The original text used the word дпужно (druzhno), which has strong overtones of “friendship”, as “together” and “friendship” in Russian have common building-blocks. That is, дпужно implies much more than “togetherness” to a Russian, it brings up images of fraternity and brotherhood, due to its similarity to the word for “friendship”. So, it’s not “let’s live together”… it’s closer to “let’s live as one”, so that’s the rendering I chose to bring the meaning home to an English-speaker.
BMD