OMFG, WTF USSR???

OK...i just stumbled across the best soviet-made cartoon i've ever seen... apparently in 1985, the US managed to slip lsd into their water, that's all i can figure...

i'm pretty frustrated that this one has no subtitles, because i don't even know enough russian to make sure not to order elk balls at a restaurant. so, i'm going to try to give a synopsis of what i think is happening at the risk of getting it completely backwards....

First, the film is called Контракт....i'm going to guess that this means 'contract...' because thats sort of what the word looks like to me, and also this dude is waving a contract around in another dudes face halfway through....but i'll get back to that later...

so, this cosmonaut is shooting space demons on the surface of some mars-like planet...i'm guessing that he is a colonist, for a corporation or state called "Sezan" or "Sezam." It was a little hard to make out and neither word seems to mean anything on babelfish... so, this colonist is suddenly surrounded by more space-dinos than he can handle and out of nowhere comes a robot that looks suspiciously like a golden cash register (they really know how to beat you over the head with heavyhanded symbolism...). Magic cash register robot joins the colonist under a forcefield he has made around them to keep the dinos out...i think the robot is telling him they should go back outside, but the colonist is like no way, dude.


'trust me, i'm a metaphor!'

so then the robot shrinks the aliens and safely stows them inside his stomach. ok. sure. crisis averted. the colonist disengages the forcefield and starts walking. then i looked away for a second and when i looked back up, a rubiks cube was unfolding into like a chair and a home entertainment console...

on the tv is a guy with the word SEZAN or SEZAM behind him...he's the typical banker/fatcat oligarch type...even has a monocle (c'mon, wasnt that dated even in the 40s?)... the robot hands the colonist a bill...i don't read russian (still) but i think it's for 'dinosaur removal and storage.'

the colonist/spaceman seems pretty pissed about this...i'm guessing because he's a recon guy for the corporation and here they are charging him for the tools he needs to keep himself out of harms way and to do the job he was hired to do....sort of like when you get hired as a waiter at a restaurant and they make you buy the apron and shirt you're required to wear (dicks).... ok, maybe marx was onto something there.

moving on, the corporate fatcat holds up a contract and is like (in russian) "you should have read the fine space print in this space contract, spaceman!" and he's like no way dude! so they send the big head from Zardoz to blow up his robot...



from this point on, i don't know what the fuck is happening...he tears up the contract, he fixes the robot and it starts laughing maniacally and then sky literally falls in....capitalism is a madness that will lead us into nuclear winter? is that right??? did i get it?

but we arent done yet. i mean that's where i would have ended this thing, but they go and top that movie where bruce willis was dead the whole time.... the camera pulls wide, and then wider, and then holy crap, the planet was actually a flower the whole time.


happy halloween...