The Golden Antelope (1954)

Purely Joyful Movie!

People are voting emotionally.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

"Zolotaya antilopa" or "The Golden Antelope" is a Soviet cartoon from 1955, so this one is already over 60 years old. It is among the most known works by director Lev Atamanov and writer Nikolay Abramov. This film runs for slightly over half an hour and is nicely animated for a 1950s film and the story is also interesting. There are some lengths in the first half especially, but the last 5-10 minutes really make up for it. It is about a boy who needs to find a golden antelope, so the local ruler won't kill him. The boy finds it, but the greed of the bad guy knows no boundaries and in the end he pays for it. Always nice to see animators who are not scared of killing bad guys in animated films. This is also why I think that it is a good watch for grown-ups too. This is certainly among the better that Soviet animation has to offer and I recommend the watch. Worth checking out and I give it a thumbs-up.

My wife and I found this as a bonus "short" on a DVD devoted to Lev Atamanov's acclaimed "The Snow Queen", a film which is said to have inspired Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away", "My Neighbour Totoro" et. al.) with a desire to work in animation. "Golden Antelope" is a highly imaginative 35-minute work, in vivid colour, which is well worth seeing in its own right.A young village boy in the Indian Jungle protects the magic antelope (a gentle creature who drops golden coins as she runs) from the pursuit of a wicked, greedy rajah and his henchmen, refusing to reveal her whereabouts even when threatened with death. Aided by a cavalcade of beautifully animated tigers, elephants, bears and monkeys, the boy tracks the antelope to her forest home. Eventually he faces down the powerful but sensually depraved rajah: "you may kill me if you like, but you do not understand the value of friendship and loyalty".The moral may be slight, but the artistic power of this short masterpiece is anything but. Atamatov's fluid animated style captures the grace, variety and subtlety of the movement of his cast, human and animal; the jungle backgrounds are sumptuous; the musical score recalls the oriental splendours of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin; and there is great humour as well as drama in this lovely example of the Russian animated tradition.

I think this is the animated film I saw on TV when I was merely seven or eight years old. I recall it being quite quiet in its depiction of a young boy on a quest (to find something, no doubt) who is aided by a magic antelope. It was on 50s TV of course, so it seemed to be black and white to me, and to have a roughly "silhouette" style of simple flat forms. But - as vague as this recall is - I DO remember that I was utterly enchanted by it. It seems to me it was presented over the course of several weekends, and that I couldn't wait for it to continue. I remember the boy riding on the antelope's back as they sped over the countryside, and (I believe) the antelope eventually undergoes a transformation. I wish I had more information. I wonder if it still exists as a film. So many have vanished.