Gagarin (1994), directed by Alexei Kharitidi and the Moscow Animation studio “Pilot”

The cartoon film Gagarin is the international breakout hit from Russia’s first non-governmental film studio, Pilot. Produced by legendary Soviet animator Alexander Tatarsky, who founded Pilot in 1988, the film was part of the studio’s short-lived international success. The animated short tells the story of a caterpillar that dreams of flight, experiences it in a traumatic journey inside a badminton birdie, and ultimately comes to dread the need to fly—even after sprouting wings as a butterfly. The film received multiple awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film in 1996 (the winner, however, was Nick Park’s A Close Shave, a stop-motion film featuring fan favorites Wallace and Gromit).

The title, “Gagarin,” was attached only after the film was completed, so it is unlikely to be determinative of the cartoon’s intended meaning. However, its apparent reference to the Soviet space program, and by extension the hopes and failures of Communism, lent the cartoon a melancholy symbolism. For Tatarsky, whose experimental stop-motion cartoons, including The Plasticine Crow (1981) and Last Year’s Snow Was Falling (1983), had made him an icon in the Soviet Union, the founding of Pilot was an attempt to respond to perestroika by making cartoons outside Soviet state support. Soon after, a significant portion of Tatarsky’s team took the chance to emigrate, leaving the studio struggling. Nonetheless, Gagarin’s Oscar nomination just eight years after Pilot’s founding validated and vindicated the complex trajectory of post-Soviet animation.