The Cheburashka Effect

Russians choose the cute, apolitical creature over martial propaganda

Ilya Grashenkov

Translated by Dan Erdman

From the editor.
People who are nostalgic about the USSR will certainly remember “kind Soviet cartoons.” One of the most popular in this series were films about Cheburashka - an incomprehensible fluffy creature with huge ears, who lives with the crocodile Gena. Who Cheburashka is and where he came from, no one, including himself, can really explain; we only know that he was found in a box of oranges. The film's other characters, whether people or animals, are, as a rule, lonely and prone to depression, with an unsettled personal lives and uninteresting work that brings no pleasure (the crocodile Gena himself works as a crocodile in the zoo). These films perfectly reflected the depressive moods of the Soviet intelligentsia during the years of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, nicknamed the era of stagnation. However, in 2023 a new version of Cheburashka was released to Russian film audiences suffering from Western sanctions, featuring however none of the usual characters except for a cute elephant-eared title monster, with a plot has been moved to our time. The film unexpectedly broke all box office records. Political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov tried to comprehend the phenomenon of the “new Cheburashka” in his blog.


Cheburashka has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can create and make money on local content. The question now is whether filmmakers will be able to repeat this feat, turning it from a one-time success into a systemic practice. The fact is that in order to properly fill the cinemas and keep the distribution network moving even in the most successful years we needed at least 5-6 Cheburashkas a year, but in the current situation of empty cinemas, many more such films are needed. For example, in France, the share of French films at the box office ranges from 30% to 40%, and besides, this can't be done only with children's films.

Of course, Cheburashka will remain only a Russian story, as the distribution of the film abroad is impossible for a number of objective reasons. In addition, it has failed to develop the kind of values it promotes. A striking example of an ideological predecessor is the British film Paddington (which also concerns oranges, by the way), which blatantly promotes the British way of life, and also follows in the footsteps of the post-colonial agenda. The new Cheburashka, meanwhile, is just a set of memes and triggers that set the teeth on edge; faced with these images the viewer sometimes cries, then laughs, then bristles like a hedgehog. I quake with horror when I consider what we will be left with if the success of Cheburashka forces our producers to push even further the ideological saturation of their content.

Nevertheless, there is nowhere else for Russian film production and distribution to go. The abundance of Korean and Turkish serials in digital cinemas confirms that things are bad, and that the next step is either cooperation with Indian Bollywood, or accept the Cheburashiization of our Mosfilm. Alas, in recent years, the patriotic agenda has been so predominant that support was provided only to those who produced films heavily saturated with ideological and historical plots. It would be good to return to the approach common to the Brezhnev years, which saw Russian adaptations of foreign dramas and musicals (from The Three Musketeers to The Irony of Fate), and allocations of budgetary funds should be market oriented. For now, it has been proven that the refreshingly unprincipled Cheburashka is good for the people, and not the common battle-historical pictures.

The text was originally published in Grashenov’s personal blog and adopted for Russian Dissent.