MOSCOW — The best-loved soundtrack of Soviet-era childhood rang with melancholy about the lost past and the unfortunate fact that birthdays come only once a year. Its star was an animated outsider — a fuzzy, large-eared "creature unknown to science" — named Cheburashka.
Now there is a corporate struggle between Russia and Japan over Cheburashka’s real place in the world.
Russia’s state-owned Soyuzmultfilm, the main Soviet animation studio founded in 1936, is struggling to recover the rights to Cheburashka from a Japanese company — much like how the character Cheburashka faces endless setbacks but never quite loses hope.
The sting of Russia’s loss of the global rights is less about nationalism than nostalgic pride and the attempts of the Russian studio to recover its past glory. Think of the American bonds to Mickey Mouse or Belgium’s embrace of Tintin.
Both Soyuzmultfilm and the Japanese company Cheburashka Project insist that they have the law on their side, which has led to an impasse. A 2018 meeting in Moscow between the two sides failed to settle the dispute.
Post-Soviet chaos
The story of what happened to the Cheburashka films traces the greed, disappointment, betrayal, incompetence and cutthroat business climate of post-Soviet Russia.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, everything not nailed down was sold off in the chaos. There were bitter personal feuds over who created Cheburashka and long court battles after the rights to the Soyuzmultfilm archive were sold off to the Californian company Films By Jove. In 2007, Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov bought them for an undisclosed sum.
The ongoing dispute involves a separate deal in 2005 between Soyuzmultfilm and Cheburashka Project, for use of the Cheburashka image. It has netted the Russian company just $46,000 in 15 years — a far cry from the $350 million Disney paid for the rights to Winnie the Pooh in 2001.
The core of the legal wrangle is a 2015 letter Soyuzmultfilm said it sent to the Japanese company, in which it stated that it would not extend a 10-year contract on exclusive global rights, excluding the former Soviet Union. According to Yuliana Slashcheva, the chairwoman of Soyuzmultfilm’s board, Cheburashka Project told the Russians it never received the letter.
Slashcheva, who was appointed in 2017, said the company had spent much of its time in recent years recovering the rights to the animations of the studio’s postwar golden age.
“We’ve returned now up to 95 percent of all the rights back to the studio. There were legal cases. Some were settled in pre-legal negotiations. So this Japanese issue with Cheburashka is almost the last one we need to settle,” Slashcheva said.
She argues that Soyuzmultfilm recovered the rights in 2015 because of the letter, and because Soyuzmultfilm has never received a license payment for the extension. But Hiroyuki Fujiwara, the managing executive officer for Cheburashka Project, said the contract “was updated in 2015, and exists between us as of now.”
Cute and critical
The Soyuzmultfilm archives — and especially Cheburashka — offer a study in creative criticism of aspects of Soviet life.
Soviet censors tried to stifle the Cheburashka animations, which poked fun at nitpicking bureaucrats, polluting factory directors, nasty train conductors and the orthodoxy of the Soviet children’s movement, the Pioneers.
Still, the character Cheburashka only sees the best in people and is chirpy even in the gloomiest situation.
The four short Soviet Cheburashka films from 1969 to 1983 were all about the boundless optimism of an appealing creature who was denied a home in the zoo, thrown off a train, trapped by unscrupulous poachers, refused a place in school and even rejected by the Pioneers. Everyone loved the soulful, existential song lyrics.
The Cheburashka films are wistful and irresistibly whimsical, unlike the slapstick, sometimes brutal animations that flooded out of U.S. studios.
Cheburashka is an exotic creature who arrived in the Soviet Union in a box of oranges and is found by a dishonest green grocer who offloads him at the zoo. There, officials reject him because he is unknown to science.
In the story, Cheburashka befriends Crocodile Gena, a zoo employee (paid to be the zoo crocodile). They try to join the Pioneers, portrayed as an exclusive and officious bunch, but are turned away because they do not know how to march or build campfires or birdhouses.
Soviet censors complained that the animation defamed the Pioneers, and a compromise line had to be hurriedly inserted saying that the Pioneers “only take the best.”
Animator Leonid Shvartsman created Cheburashka as a small toddling creature with huge ears on the side of his head that droop when he is discouraged. Cheburashka has feet without legs, big black eyes, a snub nose and a high-pitched, childlike voice. He yearns to be accepted and useful.
Japan's interest
Japanese television company TV Tokyo Communications Corp. saw a business opportunity in Cheburashka’s plucky cuteness. It later transferred the rights to Cheburashka Project, but Fujiwara said the company had not made a profit because Japan’s market is so crowded with other cute characters.
Even so, the company is not willing to surrender the rights before they expire in 2023. The company last year produced a 3-D Cheburashka animation.
Fujiwara asserts that his company gained the license from Soyuzmultfilm and also the late Eduard Uspensky, who wrote the books the animation was based on.
In a 2018 Moscow meeting, Slashcheva proposed that Cheburashka Project keep the Japanese rights but surrender the global rights. No agreement was reached. However, Fujiwara said he had not closed the door on further discussions in the future “if we receive an official request from Soyuzmultfilm.”
The dispute is further clouded by questions over who really came up with Cheburashka.
Slashcheva argues that Uspensky did not create the animated character, but that it was developed by the Soyuzmultfilm team that gave Cheburashka the look, voice and halting movement that made it so wildly popular. This was a departure from the book’s description of a “defective toy” with yellow eyes that was a cross between a hare, a cat, a dog and a kangaroo, she said.
“The image of the hero is the result of the collective work of the artists, directors and animators, and even the actress who was voicing Cheburashka. With his big eyes and his big ears, the way we love him, Cheburashka belongs to the pen of Leonid Shvartsman,” she said, referring to the Soyuzmultfilm animator.
Shvartsman, who turns 100 in August, has told Russian interviewers that no one at Soyuzmultfilm had any idea about copyright when they created Cheburashka in the 1960s. He has described a sense of betrayal, disappointment and insult when Uspensky sold off the rights.
Maya Balakirsky Katz, who left the Soviet Union as a child, grew up in the United States with Cheburashka “more or less on loop.” American cartoons like “Tom and Jerry” and “The Bugs Bunny Show” gave her terrifying nightmares.
“I remember the culture shock. I remember being scared of the television in America. My parents were like, ‘American movies are so violent,’ ” said Katz, an art historian at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the author of “Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation.”
'Simply can't belong'
“Cheburashka represents the ideal,” Katz said. “In the film he is completely innocent. He represents all that was lost, all that was maybe impossible, all that was dreamed of.”
Katz said the greats of Soviet animation were part of a cultural patrimony that was “just sold off piece by piece.” To her, some Japanese portrayals conveyed Cheburashka as a one-dimensional cute character, losing the layers of gentle social commentary.
Sergei Kapkov, animation historian and managing editor of Soyuzmultfilm, said Cheburashka differed from typical Soviet “heroic” cartoon characters.
“He is absolutely useless and hopeless,” he said. “He is like a stranger who doesn’t understand a thing but just has one global idea, and that is to make friends and have others in that little town make friends with each other.”
According to Katz, Soyuzmultfilm was a hub of creativity for Soviet Jews, who struggled to find work as fine artists but found a rich outlet for their creativity in animations. One subtle aspect of Cheburashka’s appeal, she said, is his expression of the experience of many Soviet Jews, who longed to belong and work in jobs they were qualified for, but who faced entrenched anti-Semitism.
“We, the viewers, end up having to see that Cheburashka is going to end up being disappointed,” Katz said. “Cheburashka is not going to get what he wants. In the long run, he simply can’t belong anywhere.”
Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
