‘Baby T-34’ Russian animation festival screens film about anthropomorphic young tank who dreams of war

This weekend, the 30th annual Open Russian Festival of Animated Films took place in the town of Suzdal. From the start, the event was shaped by the Kremlin’s wartime censorship and propaganda. The opening ceremony featured a state-sponsored animated film about a baby tank dreaming of war. Meanwhile, an anti-war poet and actor originally set to host the event was abruptly replaced just before it began. The next day, he passed away.

The opening ceremony of this year’s Open Russian Festival of Animated Films featured the screening of a film about a small, anthropomorphized T-34 tank that dreams of going to war. Though not listed among the competition participants, the film — funded by the Chelyabinsk Regional Youth Policy Department — follows the tank as it grows up in “Tankograd” (a Soviet-era nickname for Chelyabinsk), becomes a WWII monument in one of the Soviet republics, implied to be Estonia, and is ultimately dismantled in the 21st century.

According to attendees who spoke to the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, the film’s director, Anton Morozhenko, took to the stage and lamented that, unlike Putin, he doesn’t have a red button, so his only means of expression is through film.

The festival also marked the final days of Vadim Zhuk, a Russian actor, screenwriter, poet, and playwright who died this week at the age of 78. Zhuk had traveled to Suzdal for the festival, which he had hosted for years, Deutsche Welle reports. However, this year, he was replaced as the host of the opening ceremony at the last minute by film scholar Sergey Kapkov. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, Zhuk learned of the decision “suddenly, over the phone,” and was “deeply unsettled by the situation.” Nonetheless, he attended the ceremony and watched from the audience. His wife, Marina Kurchevskaya, confirmed his death in an interview with Russian state media.

Zhuk was a vocal critic of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, publishing dozens of anti-war poems on Facebook. His work included poems about the death of a child under shellfire and the indifference of his compatriots to the suffering caused by the war. In 2022, after the war had begun, the Kyiv-based publishing house Raduga released My Conscience is Ukrainian, a collection of anti-war poetry by Zhuk and fellow St. Petersburg poet Tatyana Voltskaya. Less than 12 hours before his death, Zhuk published his final poem on social media.