For the current generation of 40-year-olds, “Maria, Mirabela” is not just the names of charming girls, but one of her favorite childhood films, with magic characters and beautiful songs. In Soviet cinema, this is the first experience in creating a film using the method of combining filming of feature films with hand-drawn animation.
After the premiere screening of the animated - feature film for children "Maria, Mirabela" (1981), the joint work of Romanian and Soviet cinematographers received two prestigious awards at once: at the International Film Competition in the Italian city of Giffon (in the nomination "Cartoon Cinema") and at the XV All-Union Film Festival in Tallinn.
Announcements and reviews, offering to watch a full-length 64-minute tape, position “Maria, Mirabela” as a fairy tale film for everyone - both children and adults who have not forgotten their childhood and remained kind in heart.
Good tale
"Maria, Mirabela" is a beautiful, vibrant, musical story about the amazing adventures of two little girls who are planning to help a frog, a firefly and a butterfly solve their problems. To do this, they are sent together to visit the Fairy of the forest. What miracles do not happen to them. In the meadow, the sisters get acquainted with the King of caterpillars, lead a round dance with butterflies. In the realm of fairies, Mary and Mirabela are met by small maids of honor: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. There are many dangers in the way of the sisters, but they overcome fears and cope with difficulties. In the most difficult moment, the King of hours helps the brave travelers (it turns out he knows how to stop time). And they succeed. Maria and Mirabela help Kwaki free his legs, frozen to the ice lake. They are doing everything so that the ability to fly returns to the butterfly Omida. And the firefly Skiperich has new luminous shoes.
The sisters were not very upset when it turned out that in fact all these adventures took place in a dream. But there were mom (Fairy of the forest) and dad (King of hours) nearby. And their true parental love.
The plot is built so that the fairy tale not only entertains. It helps to understand the difference between good and evil, teaches compassion, kindness, courage. Of course, there is a place for philosophical maxims. For example, one can hear phrases from the characters: “The past cannot be returned, it can only be remembered”, “Only a very brave one can save a friend in trouble”, “Water freezes from untruth”. But is this not the same folk wisdom for which both children and adults love old, good tales.
Features of working together on a film
The project to create in 1981 a musical animation - feature film "Maria, Mirabela" was international (USSR-Romania) and was carried out with the participation of the All-Union Union of Sovinfilm. The film product was prepared jointly at three different film studios: the Romanian Casa de Filme 5, Moldova-Film and our famous Soyuzmultfilm. The screenwriter and director was the Romanian director Ion Popescu-Gopo, together with colleague Natalia Bodiul.
The work was carried out not on one site, but was distributed between countries by segments. The game part, including full-scale shooting, was for Romania and Moldova. In addition, under the terms of the contract, Romanian actors were invited to all roles. The animation was created in Moscow. The Soyuzmultfilm went through the whole cycle: from creating characters and drawing scenes with their participation to the stage of simple production, when talking animals were animated. The final product was presented in two forms: the original version in Romanian and the dubbed version for the Soviet audience. For dubbing, they attracted a galaxy of wonderful actors, voice masters: Lyudmila Gnilova and Natalya Gurzo (Maria and Mirabela), Maria Vinogradova (Kvaki), Alexander Voevodin (Skipirich), Klara Rumyanova (Omide), Alina Pokrovskaya (Fairy of the Forest), George Vitsin (caterpillars), Rogvold Sukhoverko (King of hours). Unexpectedly for our actors, the Romanian language turned out to be difficult for simultaneous dubbing, sometimes it was not possible to "get into the labia" (as it is called in professional jargon).
The directors faced another difficulty when they started working with performers of the main children's roles (Maria - Medea Marinescu, Mirabela - Gilda Manolescu). They needed to present their animated characters, to conduct dialogs with imaginary characters, to know which way to look and talk. To make it easier for girls to work, our animators specially sculpted for them plasticine figures of heroes participating in a particular episode. Despite the consonance in the surnames, the girls, like their heroines, were different in character and temperament: the restless and mobile Medea (Mirabela) and the soft and gentle Guild (Maria). They were united by one thing: spontaneity and an open children's soul. At the time of filming, the actresses were 6 years old. Preschoolers were not quite sure yet reading, but they could not remember a voluminous text by ear. Much of what went into the frame was invented by them on the go. They knew how to fantasize and compose, and therefore turned out to be sincere and convincing on the screen.
After the filming was completed, the girls never met each other. The dark-eyed Medea Marinescu, who played the mischievous fidget Mirabela, over the years turned into a stately beauty actress. The fate of her sister in the film of Mary, the blonde and blue-eyed Gilda Manolescu, fell a different fate. She did not act in films anymore. Having survived two terrible tragedies that eventually broke her, a young, beautiful woman passed away at age 35.
The screen actress of one role for the audience was the on-screen mother of the sisters - Fairy of the forest (Ingrid Celia). Neither at the film forums, nor in other information sources can one draw any information about the career and work of this Romanian actress.
The on-screen image of the pope (he is the King of hours in a fabulous childhood dream) does not immediately combine with the personality of Ion Popescu-Gopo. At home, a talented director and animator occasionally appeared on the screen as a performer of small roles, both in his own films and in the films of his playmates. He comes from a Russian-Romanian family. The art of animation mastered during training in Moscow. Soviet children Ion Popescu-Gopo was remembered for one role, in the image of Uncle Vremya (this is the name of the character in the original version of the film). By the way, according to Romanian critics, the plot of the story invented by the director involved ancient fairy-tale motifs.
Interactive with cartoon heroes
Today you can see animated inserts in feature films quite often - with the help of cartoony captions you can easily set the desired tone of the film, and the drawn inserts inside the plot are used to depict various kinds of dreams and hallucinations.
The idea of making people on the screen convincingly communicate with cartoon characters excited the imagination of the pioneers of animation, such as Jay Stewart Blackton, Emil Kohl, Winsor McKay. However, for a long time it was impossible to give a full-fledged “interactive” for technical reasons. Disney studio was able to take the height. In 1944, the first musical cartoon "Three Caballeros" appeared - about a trip to Latin America by Donald Duck in the company of the parrot Jose Carioca and the cockerel Panchito. Mixed animation - fiction films began to actively develop in the west. The Americans perfected the idea of integrating cartoon characters into a feature film by releasing the Oscar-winning comedy "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in 1988.
But the Soviet audience in the 80s did not have wide access to the Walt Disney Pictures classics. To see how real actors interact with painted characters was possible only in the Disney version of the story of Mary Poppins. Therefore, the appearance of the first cartoon film "Maria, Mirabela" was perceived as some kind of miracle. For Soviet children, not spoiled by spectacles, the movie story with cartoon characters, and even of foreign origin, was a resounding success. For Soyuzmultfilm, the Soviet-Romanian project was the first experience in using hand-drawn animation in feature films.
The director of the picture was the famous artist Lev Milchin. The director of the film, Nikolai Yevlyukhin, recalls the words that Lev Isaakovich repeated at all meetings: "This is the first film in the Soviet Union that we make so combined. Of course, there are a lot of characters. Of course, it's hard for us." There were often disputes between the production designer and the director of the picture, and it came to quarrels. The multipliers could not decide what the main characters of the picture would look like: Kwaki, Skiperich and Omide. Because of this, the entire filming process often stopped.
- Animation director No. 1, as Jonah Popescu-Gopo was called in Romania, was a cartoonist and a supporter of animated minimalism (remember his famous hand-drawn man).
- Lev Milchin is a classic of Soviet animation. Since 1962, he worked at the Soyuzmultfilm studio and created vivid, colorful, fully-painted characters typical of the Soviet animation (Tsvetik-Sevensvetik, Piggy Bank, Geese-Swans, Persistent Tin Soldiers, a whole palette of Russian folk tales).
Due to disagreements in drawing the main characters, the work dragged on for more than two years. But the result exceeded all expectations. Together, animators from different schools created a visual concept that was in no way inferior to Walt Disney Pictures. And the scene of turning caterpillars into butterflies today affects no less than the Disney "Fantasy". The cartoon film turned out to be "wonderful-wonderful", just the one about which it is sung in the initial song to him.
magical music
Remembering the work on the picture, the author of the music, composer Eugene Doga, says that the melodic of two words, Maria and Mirabela, played a decisive role for him. In harmony with the names of the heroines, he heard music. I don’t know if something would have happened in other words, the composer notes.
In the original version of the film, songs are performed by Romanian artists, in particular, the popular singer Mihai Konstantinescu. At the company "Melody" in 1983, a record was released with the audio-tale "Maria, Mirabela". The Russian text of the announcer sounds on it, and all the songs are stored in the original language. In the film itself, which was intended for Soviet viewers, full dubbing was done. They translated not only the speech of the characters, but also re-sounded the songs. Poems to the music of Eugene Dogi were written by Valentin Berestov and Eugene Agranovich.
In the movie, the frog Kwaki speaks and sings in the voice of the popular actress Maria Vinogradova. She often voiced cartoon characters, such as a hedgehog in the fog. The opening song, in which the cartoon character sings "wonderfully wonderful, " stepped from the screen to the little listeners, they began to broadcast it on radio and television in children's programs, and included them in collections of songs for children. But with the title song "Maria, Mirabela", which formed the basis of the soundtrack for the film, none of the actors could not cope. The search began for professional performers with vocal data, making it easy to "jump" an octave up. The test track was already recorded by the then famous Alexander Gradsky. However, its performance to some of the creators seemed not childish. In a dubbed version of the film, the thin and soft tenor of Leonid Serebrennikov sounds.
The song "Maria, Mirabela" was so popular that it gained an independent stage biography, it was included in the repertoire of pop singers of the 80s. After some time, Eugene Doga wrote a lyrical composition on the theme of the film (verses by Andrei Dementiev). She sounded from the stage performed by the popular singer Nadezhda Chepragi and was also called "Maria, Mirabela."
