Animatsiya.net, 1000 films later!
Hi everyone! Animatsiya.net has recently hit the 1K films milestone, so I suppose I should write a little about where we're at at the moment.
The site's been visited by over 13,000 unique visitors since it opened, with each one clicking on ~10 film pages. Some of these visitors have made accounts and sent me thanks through the site's messaging system, or even contributed themselves (more on that below).
The Works of Decades
Some months after the site opened, I decided to add a menu option to browse the films by decade, because I noticed that the films of a particular time period tended to have a certain flavour (perhaps this a topic for a future post). In any case, it seems to be no worse a browsing method than to do it by genre, director or studio.
The earliest film on the site is from 1906, and the latest from 2020 (I've been too busy to check up on the more recent ones, to be honest). By decade, it currently breaks down like this:
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
4
5
12
34
35
59
88
135
224
148
140
114
2
Directors
The films are made by 418 different directors. There mostly hasn't been a particular order in which they've gotten added, but there HAS been a conscious attempt to translate and include the full filmography of a few of the more important directors, or at least what has survived. Notably:
Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg (35 films, made from 1928-1978)
Ivan Ivanov-Vano (26 films, 1934-1979 - the "patriarch" of Soviet animation for most of its existence. Actually, his very last film is not on the site yet, but soon will be)
Roman Kachanov (26 films, 1958-1986 - most famous for being the director of the "Cheburashka" series and "Secret of the Third Planet")
Ivan Maximov (25 films - one of the more interesting and distinctive modern directors, who makes wordless films about strange creatures)
Olga Hodatayeva (23 films, 1928-1960 - wife of the pioneer Nikolay, I'd say her films were characteristic for being "like the mainstream style of the time period, but better done than most")
Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya (19 films, 1947-1974 - her specialty was stories about heroic deeds)
Fyodor Hitruk (16 films, 1962-1983 - pioneer of stylized/limited animation in the 1960s, most famous for his excellent "Winnie the Pooh" series, but all his films are either gems or very good)
Yuriy Norshteyn (12 films, 1968-2003 - a Russian-Jewish director beloved by top animators around the world, working on an animated feature since the early 1980s...)
Nikolay Hodatayev (8 films, 1924-1935 - a Soviet animation pioneer whose career died in the mid-1930s with the forced switch away from cutout-animation and into Disney-copying)
Aleksandr Petrov (7 films, 1988-2006 - the country's only Oscar-winning animation director, painting his films with oil paint on glass)
Studios
115 different studios are represented, although the collection is skewed towards the big Moscow-based studios: Soyuzmultfilm (347 films), Ekran (127) and Pilot (54). Next after that: Ukraine's Kievnauchfilm (now Ukranimafilm, 48 films), Estonia's Tallinnfilm (26 films). Some other regional studios that are represented are Armenfilm (21), Georgia Film (19), Sverdlovsk Film Studio/A-Film from the Ural Mountains (18), Belarusfilm(18) and Uzbekfilm (15).
Subtitling
The purpose of the site was to create an accessible place to discover and watch animation from Russia and the former USSR, even for non-Russian speakers. So, since English is the leading language of international discourse (not to mention the one besides Russian that I'm proficient in), that meant adding English subtitles to as many of them as possible. Since the site opened, 433 English subtitles have been either created from scratch (about 1/4th, mostly by me) or updated to correct mistakes and improve them (about 3/4ths, mostly originally by Eus, a native Dutch-speaker who has subtitled probably over 1000 Russian animated films but often with mistakes because neither English nor Russian is his native language)
However, I've also been adding subtitles in other languages whenever I've found them, and some of the users have begun to contribute subtitles in their own languages.
Of the 1000 animated films on the site (actually, 1001 now):
394 are wordless and don't need any subtitles
633 have English subtitles (although 50 of those are wordless and don't strictly need them, so let's say 583).
304 have Russian subtitles (very useful for those learning the language... or for the deaf, of course)
99 Spanish
93 Czech
81 Vietnamese
23 Bulgarian
20 French
20 Slovak
11 Dutch
10 Turkish
There are also subtitles in other languages, but only fewer than 10 films.
You may notice that the languages with the most subtitles aren't always the most popular languages worldwide. Making these translations is a labour of love, and there are usually only a few people per language (or only one) who do this. For example, the high number of Vietnamese subs is due entirely to Cynir (aka. Duy Kiền or Vergilarchivum), who was translating them before animatsiya.net existed. The Bulgarian subs are almost all by Жукороп (Zhukorop), who is also a site member.
I also try to seek them out in other places, but every language (or closely-related group of languages) seem to have their own subtitles website, and perhaps for some languages I simply haven't found the location where those subtitles can be found.
Russian subs are currently to be found at subtitry.ru, by various people (earlier on, a great many were made by Elena from deafnet.ru - a website for the hard-of-hearing).
For Spanish subs, I find most of them on the profile page of Yefren (a Chilean) at SubDivX.com (he actually has over 250 there, most of which I haven't added yet). There are also a smattering by other Spanish-speakers: Jose RB (at his blog CineRusia), Kino, Kuroku, Otterkind (at KG), Ulises a few others. I think that Yefren, at least, has translated from Eus's English subs rather than directly from Russian; so since many those had mistakes before I corrected them, many Spanish subs may also need correcting.
All the Czech subs were made by two people: wero1000 (aka. robert.haring_) at OpenSubtitles.org at and at the Czech site CSFD.cz, and wauhelly at SubScene.com and at the West-Slavic site Titulky. As far as I can tell, both of them translate directly from Russian.
The Vietnamese subs are made and uploaded by Cynir to animatsiya.net and, according to him, can currently be found only here. Not all of them are on the site yet. Many of them were translated from Eus's old English subtitles, so the same disclaimer applies as for the Spanish subs.
The Bulgarian subs, as mentioned, are uploaded by Zhukorop to animatsiya.net. Originally, they were also at his Youtube channel, but that disappeared as such channels often do on Youtube. Me and Zhukorop are also working on a Bulgarian-language version of animatsiya.net! It's a lot of work and not quite ready yet, but it's well on its way.
Some French subtitles can be found at Alexios6's profile at OpenSubtitles.org, but I strongly suspect they were originally uploaded elsewhere. There may be a good source for French subtitles somewhere, but I haven't found it.
Slovak subtitles seem to all be by M.M. (M7797M), and can be found on his profile at Titulky. There are 60 there in total; I haven't added all of them yet.
Dutch subtitles are all by Eus - he mostly made English subtitles, but he made some in his native language too.
Future Plans
There are a number of things planned for the site, besides adding more films:
1) Playlists and collections - a big limitation currently is that one can only watch one film at a time, then you have to select a new one. This is less than ideal if you want to just relax for a while because most of the films on the site are short. So the plan is to allow users to create playlists just like on Youtube. You won't need to be signed in to do it, but being signed in will allow you to save the playlist for later, and you'll be able to either have it private or public. Also, you'll be able to make collections of playlists.
2) Adding a Bulgarian-language version of the site, then a Russian-language one. As mentioned, the Bulgarian one is currently being worked on by Zhukorop (the translation) and me (the implementation). The plan is that once you're on a language-specific version of the site, the only films that'll show up (at least, unless you directly type in the URL) are the ones that either have subtitles in that language or are wordless. Other languages with a respectable number of subtitles could be added too - for example, Czech, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. But it depends on whether people are willing to help with that.
3) Age-category ratings, possibly voting-based. Although I was resistant to this initially (because I thought that there were many films that appeal to different age groups), I think now that it would really help some people find what they're looking for. I don't think simply having a "NSFW/18+" genre is enough, because I've noticed that many films have nothing "18+" going on (in the sense of sex/violence), but mentally they are directed at a certain age level and those who aren't in it may not get much from them. This is true both of films directed at very young children, and of films directed at those well into adulthood... or those directed at teens, for that matter. So I propose to have ~4 age categories, something like 0-6, 7-13, 14-20, 21+. Anyone will be able to vote (+ or -) on whether they think a film is particularly WELL-suited, or ILL-suited to an age bracket. So you think a film is equally well-suited to all ages, you just don't give a rating at all. If you think it's really good for 0-6 year-olds, but other age groups will also be just fine watching it, give "0-6" a "+" and leave the rest alone. If you think a film is primarily aimed at those over 14, and would NOT be good for viewers 0-6, give a "-" to "0-6" and a "+" to both "14-20" and "21+".
4) Adding more video options besides Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. First priority (sites that also have good APIs, though less widely used): Archive.org (uses JW Player v 8.22.0), Rumble, PeerTube. Secondary priority (these seem to lack sophisticated player APIs, but many are still widely used at least in certain parts of the world): BiliBili, VK, RuTube, Aparat, Okko, BitChute, Mover.uz. Synched subtitles should be possible to get working for any video site with a player API that has an equivalent to Youtube's "getCurrentTime" method (most of them don't, though).
5) A public forum? I've been going back and forth on this, because it will likely make the community bigger, but will also probably require moderation. There's already the opportunity to contact anyone with an account on the site, and even to send messages to multiple people at once, kind of like in a Discord room. However, not many people use this feature.
P.S. Also, yes, since the last post on this blog back in December, a terrible thing has been happening. However, I don't want to write about it. I'll only say that a few months ago I saw an award-winning, surreal 2019 Ukrainian animation, Deep Love by Mykyta Lyskov, that I thought did a good job of capturing the feel of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) from a local's perspective. And also that Aleksandr Petrov (Russia's only Oscar-winning animation director) seems to have good foresight, because the animated feature he's currently in production on (and had been planning for over a decade) looks like it may be very topical once it comes out (it'll feature Aleksandr Nevsky and a major theme will reportedly be his diplomatic journeys to the East - to the Mongol Horde).
The site's been visited by over 13,000 unique visitors since it opened, with each one clicking on ~10 film pages. Some of these visitors have made accounts and sent me thanks through the site's messaging system, or even contributed themselves (more on that below).
The Works of Decades
Some months after the site opened, I decided to add a menu option to browse the films by decade, because I noticed that the films of a particular time period tended to have a certain flavour (perhaps this a topic for a future post). In any case, it seems to be no worse a browsing method than to do it by genre, director or studio.
The earliest film on the site is from 1906, and the latest from 2020 (I've been too busy to check up on the more recent ones, to be honest). By decade, it currently breaks down like this:
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2020s
4
5
12
34
35
59
88
135
224
148
140
114
2
Directors
The films are made by 418 different directors. There mostly hasn't been a particular order in which they've gotten added, but there HAS been a conscious attempt to translate and include the full filmography of a few of the more important directors, or at least what has survived. Notably:
Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg (35 films, made from 1928-1978)
Ivan Ivanov-Vano (26 films, 1934-1979 - the "patriarch" of Soviet animation for most of its existence. Actually, his very last film is not on the site yet, but soon will be)
Roman Kachanov (26 films, 1958-1986 - most famous for being the director of the "Cheburashka" series and "Secret of the Third Planet")
Ivan Maximov (25 films - one of the more interesting and distinctive modern directors, who makes wordless films about strange creatures)
Olga Hodatayeva (23 films, 1928-1960 - wife of the pioneer Nikolay, I'd say her films were characteristic for being "like the mainstream style of the time period, but better done than most")
Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya (19 films, 1947-1974 - her specialty was stories about heroic deeds)
Fyodor Hitruk (16 films, 1962-1983 - pioneer of stylized/limited animation in the 1960s, most famous for his excellent "Winnie the Pooh" series, but all his films are either gems or very good)
Yuriy Norshteyn (12 films, 1968-2003 - a Russian-Jewish director beloved by top animators around the world, working on an animated feature since the early 1980s...)
Nikolay Hodatayev (8 films, 1924-1935 - a Soviet animation pioneer whose career died in the mid-1930s with the forced switch away from cutout-animation and into Disney-copying)
Aleksandr Petrov (7 films, 1988-2006 - the country's only Oscar-winning animation director, painting his films with oil paint on glass)
Studios
115 different studios are represented, although the collection is skewed towards the big Moscow-based studios: Soyuzmultfilm (347 films), Ekran (127) and Pilot (54). Next after that: Ukraine's Kievnauchfilm (now Ukranimafilm, 48 films), Estonia's Tallinnfilm (26 films). Some other regional studios that are represented are Armenfilm (21), Georgia Film (19), Sverdlovsk Film Studio/A-Film from the Ural Mountains (18), Belarusfilm(18) and Uzbekfilm (15).
Subtitling
The purpose of the site was to create an accessible place to discover and watch animation from Russia and the former USSR, even for non-Russian speakers. So, since English is the leading language of international discourse (not to mention the one besides Russian that I'm proficient in), that meant adding English subtitles to as many of them as possible. Since the site opened, 433 English subtitles have been either created from scratch (about 1/4th, mostly by me) or updated to correct mistakes and improve them (about 3/4ths, mostly originally by Eus, a native Dutch-speaker who has subtitled probably over 1000 Russian animated films but often with mistakes because neither English nor Russian is his native language)
However, I've also been adding subtitles in other languages whenever I've found them, and some of the users have begun to contribute subtitles in their own languages.
Of the 1000 animated films on the site (actually, 1001 now):
394 are wordless and don't need any subtitles
633 have English subtitles (although 50 of those are wordless and don't strictly need them, so let's say 583).
304 have Russian subtitles (very useful for those learning the language... or for the deaf, of course)
99 Spanish
93 Czech
81 Vietnamese
23 Bulgarian
20 French
20 Slovak
11 Dutch
10 Turkish
There are also subtitles in other languages, but only fewer than 10 films.
You may notice that the languages with the most subtitles aren't always the most popular languages worldwide. Making these translations is a labour of love, and there are usually only a few people per language (or only one) who do this. For example, the high number of Vietnamese subs is due entirely to Cynir (aka. Duy Kiền or Vergilarchivum), who was translating them before animatsiya.net existed. The Bulgarian subs are almost all by Жукороп (Zhukorop), who is also a site member.
I also try to seek them out in other places, but every language (or closely-related group of languages) seem to have their own subtitles website, and perhaps for some languages I simply haven't found the location where those subtitles can be found.
Russian subs are currently to be found at subtitry.ru, by various people (earlier on, a great many were made by Elena from deafnet.ru - a website for the hard-of-hearing).
For Spanish subs, I find most of them on the profile page of Yefren (a Chilean) at SubDivX.com (he actually has over 250 there, most of which I haven't added yet). There are also a smattering by other Spanish-speakers: Jose RB (at his blog CineRusia), Kino, Kuroku, Otterkind (at KG), Ulises a few others. I think that Yefren, at least, has translated from Eus's English subs rather than directly from Russian; so since many those had mistakes before I corrected them, many Spanish subs may also need correcting.
All the Czech subs were made by two people: wero1000 (aka. robert.haring_) at OpenSubtitles.org at and at the Czech site CSFD.cz, and wauhelly at SubScene.com and at the West-Slavic site Titulky. As far as I can tell, both of them translate directly from Russian.
The Vietnamese subs are made and uploaded by Cynir to animatsiya.net and, according to him, can currently be found only here. Not all of them are on the site yet. Many of them were translated from Eus's old English subtitles, so the same disclaimer applies as for the Spanish subs.
The Bulgarian subs, as mentioned, are uploaded by Zhukorop to animatsiya.net. Originally, they were also at his Youtube channel, but that disappeared as such channels often do on Youtube. Me and Zhukorop are also working on a Bulgarian-language version of animatsiya.net! It's a lot of work and not quite ready yet, but it's well on its way.
Some French subtitles can be found at Alexios6's profile at OpenSubtitles.org, but I strongly suspect they were originally uploaded elsewhere. There may be a good source for French subtitles somewhere, but I haven't found it.
Slovak subtitles seem to all be by M.M. (M7797M), and can be found on his profile at Titulky. There are 60 there in total; I haven't added all of them yet.
Dutch subtitles are all by Eus - he mostly made English subtitles, but he made some in his native language too.
Future Plans
There are a number of things planned for the site, besides adding more films:
1) Playlists and collections - a big limitation currently is that one can only watch one film at a time, then you have to select a new one. This is less than ideal if you want to just relax for a while because most of the films on the site are short. So the plan is to allow users to create playlists just like on Youtube. You won't need to be signed in to do it, but being signed in will allow you to save the playlist for later, and you'll be able to either have it private or public. Also, you'll be able to make collections of playlists.
2) Adding a Bulgarian-language version of the site, then a Russian-language one. As mentioned, the Bulgarian one is currently being worked on by Zhukorop (the translation) and me (the implementation). The plan is that once you're on a language-specific version of the site, the only films that'll show up (at least, unless you directly type in the URL) are the ones that either have subtitles in that language or are wordless. Other languages with a respectable number of subtitles could be added too - for example, Czech, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. But it depends on whether people are willing to help with that.
3) Age-category ratings, possibly voting-based. Although I was resistant to this initially (because I thought that there were many films that appeal to different age groups), I think now that it would really help some people find what they're looking for. I don't think simply having a "NSFW/18+" genre is enough, because I've noticed that many films have nothing "18+" going on (in the sense of sex/violence), but mentally they are directed at a certain age level and those who aren't in it may not get much from them. This is true both of films directed at very young children, and of films directed at those well into adulthood... or those directed at teens, for that matter. So I propose to have ~4 age categories, something like 0-6, 7-13, 14-20, 21+. Anyone will be able to vote (+ or -) on whether they think a film is particularly WELL-suited, or ILL-suited to an age bracket. So you think a film is equally well-suited to all ages, you just don't give a rating at all. If you think it's really good for 0-6 year-olds, but other age groups will also be just fine watching it, give "0-6" a "+" and leave the rest alone. If you think a film is primarily aimed at those over 14, and would NOT be good for viewers 0-6, give a "-" to "0-6" and a "+" to both "14-20" and "21+".
4) Adding more video options besides Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. First priority (sites that also have good APIs, though less widely used): Archive.org (uses JW Player v 8.22.0), Rumble, PeerTube. Secondary priority (these seem to lack sophisticated player APIs, but many are still widely used at least in certain parts of the world): BiliBili, VK, RuTube, Aparat, Okko, BitChute, Mover.uz. Synched subtitles should be possible to get working for any video site with a player API that has an equivalent to Youtube's "getCurrentTime" method (most of them don't, though).
5) A public forum? I've been going back and forth on this, because it will likely make the community bigger, but will also probably require moderation. There's already the opportunity to contact anyone with an account on the site, and even to send messages to multiple people at once, kind of like in a Discord room. However, not many people use this feature.
P.S. Also, yes, since the last post on this blog back in December, a terrible thing has been happening. However, I don't want to write about it. I'll only say that a few months ago I saw an award-winning, surreal 2019 Ukrainian animation, Deep Love by Mykyta Lyskov, that I thought did a good job of capturing the feel of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) from a local's perspective. And also that Aleksandr Petrov (Russia's only Oscar-winning animation director) seems to have good foresight, because the animated feature he's currently in production on (and had been planning for over a decade) looks like it may be very topical once it comes out (it'll feature Aleksandr Nevsky and a major theme will reportedly be his diplomatic journeys to the East - to the Mongol Horde).