Tall tales

Studio: Soyuzmultfilm

Short Plot Synopsis

Tall tales is a three-minute nonsense segment built for Vesyolaya karusel No. 2, not a freestanding prestige short with room for elaborate setup. Its subject is right in the title: impossible exaggerations, comic contradictions, and verbal/visual absurdities delivered at anthology speed, with the joke depending on how quickly the film can pile one implausible claim on top of the next.

That program context matters because the short is designed as a burst of concentrated comic energy inside a mixed package. It works like a miniature magazine item, not like a self-contained dramatic cartoon.

Why Is It Worth Watching?

• It shows how much authorship and graphic wit can be packed into a three-minute anthology slot.
• It preserves the Vesyolaya karusel mode at its purest: fast, absurd, and structured around one concentrated comic idea rather than storybook fullness.
• It makes anthology-era Soviet animation legible as a distinct form, where the unit of invention could be one tiny segment rather than a whole standalone short.

Legacy And Impact

Tall tales matters because Vesyolaya karusel segments can disappear historically unless their individual identities are kept visible. Archive listings that preserve it both as a standalone title and as Strautmane's contribution to Vesyolaya karusel No. 2 help restore the original way audiences would have encountered it: as one authored comic module inside a curated program. The three-minute runtime and the cleaned-up Kandel/Kurlyandskiy/Khait writing credits make the film read less like anonymous filler and more like a deliberately made anthology miniature.

Its legacy is therefore tied to format as much as content. Keeping the segment legible helps preserve anthology-era Soviet animation as a real production culture, not just a storage bin for minor leftovers.

Trivia

• Later database listings often file the short both under its standalone title and under Vesyolaya karusel No. 2. Nebylitsy, a reminder that anthology-era Soviet shorts can disappear unless their segment identities are kept visible, and unless authorship metadata is kept from collapsing into stray cast attributions.
• That dual identity is part of the point: the film survives historically not just as a self-contained cartoon, but as one unit inside a curated program that originally shaped how viewers met it and preserved its legibility afterward.
• The same evidence pattern also justifies keeping the article at year precision: the three-minute anthology segment survives more clearly as a named program unit than as a day-dated release event.
• On the current evidence, the entry should therefore be treated as metadata-stable at year precision unless stronger primary release documentation appears.
• A direct check of the linked Wikidata entity still only returns a year-precision release claim for 1970, which matches the article's refusal to imply a cleaner calendar date than the evidence supports.