General plan: panorama of a Soviet summer city. Zoom in: boulevard, fountain, children playing, mothers walking with strollers, citizens hurrying about their business. A girl named Katya, about ten years old, in a short dress, with two pigtails, is walking along the boulevard, expertly kicking a ball. Right there she meets a boy loaded with several boxes, they exchange short phrases, and together they go to Katya's home.
All in one shot, did you notice?
An apartment in a Stalin-era building, close-up: a crocodile, two rabbits, a turtle and a starling are sitting in boxes.
The boy leaves, Katya runs to the grocery store, buys oatmeal, then hurries to the cinema, ducks past the ticket collector, catches her friend in the theater, hurriedly tells her that she has animals at home, "state property", and they quickly leave the theater together. They run through the city, gather their girlfriends, and strangers who accidentally heard about the exotic menagerie also tag along. Along the way, they accidentally touch a large man with bales, and he scatters balls, "one hundred twenty-five pieces according to the invoice", the kids immediately snatch them up, and now the whole street is playing with multi-colored balls of various sizes. The balls scattered - the balls gathered, all "one hundred twenty-five according to the invoice" - we run on.
The whole honest company bursts into Katya's apartment. There are no animals here...
Stop, cut!
All in one shot, did you notice?
Then this monolithic storyline splits into several, it won't work in one frame, but each branch continues to develop at a breakneck speed. As you probably already understood, now the whole city will catch the animals that have run away.
So, with renewed vigor. Camera, motor, shooting!
Katya and her comrades follow the tracks of a turtle, which the local kids managed to exchange several times: first for candy wrappers, then for a book about Baron Munchausen. They fish the turtle out of the lake.
Katya's dad, with the help of a mop, bagels and priceless advice from onlookers, extracts a crocodile from a drainpipe and, like Lenin with a log, walks along the wide avenue of a flourishing city with a crocodile clinging to a mop on his shoulder.
Prodigal rabbits return to their native land in a cake box (a luxurious one, with cream).
"Hello!" shouts the starling, who has had his fill of walking in the wild, and dives into the cage on the windowsill.
It all ends with a mass tea party and cake (gorgeous, with cream).
Stop. Cut.
A fast-paced, fun and very cinematic book"Katya and the crocodile".
Leave a comment