The animation competition at Russia's Window to Europe film festival grew from 20 entries to 21 this year after organizers swapped out one film on the fourth day of the event. Dmitry Sokolov and Galina Ozerina's The One Who Gives Happiness was pulled from the lineup and replaced with two shorter works, Natalya Rocheva's On a Walk and Anastasia Zhakulina's Neyasyt.
Rocheva's On a Walk follows a grandfather who loses his glasses while walking his dog. The mishap sends the dog on a small adventure through several scrapes as it tries to retrieve the glasses that slipped off its owner's nose.
Alexei Ignatov's At Christmas Everyone Is a Bit of a Magus adapts Joseph Brodsky's poem "24 December 1971." Like the poem, the film builds toward a pre-Christmas miracle, showing an ordinary world of people rushing for buses and vanishing into courtyards, while suggesting that beneath the bustle, passersby resemble biblical magi carrying gifts fit for Bethlehem in their shopping bags.
The Kitten and the Hedgehog
Vsevolod Bulavkin's The Kitten and the Hedgehog is based on the short story Domestic Hedgehog by Vladimir Shinkarev, one of the founders of the Mitki art movement, who died in April 2026. In the film, a patient at a psychiatric hospital near St. Petersburg's Kresty prison, a hedgehog who is also a talented artist, meets a kitten, and the two decide to marry inside the hospital walls.
The film premiered at the Suzdalfest international animation festival, where the jury awarded it with the description "for mastery and marginal charm." The Kresty district carries its own literary history, linked to Lev Gumilev and the mother who visited him there, Anna Akhmatova, as well as Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Zabolotsky and Joseph Brodsky. Bulavkin's film does not dwell on that history directly, instead exploring the broader relationship between an artist and the outside world, represented by a kitten who asks to be captured in a portrait and then rejects it, failing to recognize her own reflection.
Let It Snow and the whale-fall scene
Sofia Feoktistova's Let It Snow! follows a 9-year-old boy named Slavik who has grown skeptical of the approaching New Year. The world around him offers little sense of wonder: slush on the streets, a drunken Ded Moroz and Snegurochka slumped outside a store called Prosrochka, and a television endlessly replaying the same holiday broadcast.
Slavik finds his snow and holiday spirit through animated clips from a nature documentary about deep-sea creatures, sequences the director has said were among the hardest parts of production to draw. Through them, he learns about "whale fall," the process by which a dead whale's flesh and skin sink and scatter across the ocean floor in a way that resembles falling snow. Feoktistova dedicated the film to Stephen Hillenberg, creator of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Day 12 arrives as a festival favorite
Polina Bovkun's Day 12 moves from the ocean depths of Feoktistova's film into the depths of human memory. It is Bovkun's first work since graduating from Soyuzmultfilm's directing courses in 2022, and it already screened in the out-of-competition program at Suzdalfest 2026 and won the grand prix at the Bessonitsa festival, arriving at Window to Europe as one of the favorites.
The film opens at a gas station during a family road trip, where a brother and sister argue over a baseball cap moments before a fatal crash. Day 12 dwells less on plot than on the space between life and death, between the present and memory, with sound design by composer Artem Fadeev. A boy is kept from being swallowed by that space only by the hope of reuniting with the people he loves, even though the crash's consequences cannot be undone.
From the Depths, a stop-motion debut
Anastasia Nacharova's debut film From the Depths, made in stop-motion, follows 16-year-old Nadya, who fights with her deaf and mute mother and runs into the forest, where she begins destroying everything around her in a fit of anger. A Russian sign language consultant worked on the production.
In the forest, Nadya meets the spirit of the woods, a giant apple tree whose fruits are shaped like small hearts made of wool. As punishment for the damage she caused, the tree tears out Nadya's heart and turns her into a snag. Hearts in the film can grow on branches or roll away from their owners, and the snags and trees are former people who lost their hearts and can still cry. Of all the films in the program, this one spends the longest stretch inside its otherworldly setting, leaving open the hope that a heart can grow back through repentance.
The Force of Friction closes the program
Program curator Alena Sycheva's boldest selection may be Anna Lyubimtseva's The Force of Friction. Lyubimtseva has also worked as an animator on Leonid Shmelkov's feature film Nepokoy, currently in theaters. Her own film centers on sexual relationships and, more broadly, on the creation of life through love.
Stepan and Elena live in the same house and sleep together. From their window they can see a forest modeled on the Garden of Eden, where couples walk naked and rub their backs together, an act the film treats as the literal force of friction, the way people show each other love. Stepan and Elena, the film suggests, have not rubbed backs in a long time.
