Archive · 2021 · From the print edition of Monday 12 April 2021, Vol. 29, No. 8,791
CultureTulpar Tales flies where Kulunchak ran
The first Iradi-made animated series has a winged horse for a hero. Our critic sees in it the foal from the Soviet cartoons IradOne has never been able to show.
TALAS — Tulpar Tales, the first animated series made in Irad, was released on Saturday, and children in Talas have talked about nothing else since. Its hero is Kanat, a boy with a winged horse who flies over the valleys of Irad to help people in trouble.
Anyone over forty will think of Kulunchak, the foal of the Soviet cartoons drawn by the animator Kojoev, who ran across the steppe in a series every Iradi child of the 1970s and 1980s knew by heart. The rights to those films stayed in Moscow after 1992, so IradOne has never been able to broadcast them, and Iradis have watched them only on old copies, and now online. Kojoev's drawings are in the Talasfilm Archives.
Kanat flies because Kulunchak had to run. Tulpar Tales is everything the old films could not be: in Iradi, set in places children can name, with a church on a hill and a grandmother who makes kurut. The animation is simpler than Moscow's, and the jokes are better.
The producers say twelve episodes have been made, and they hope for a second season. If the playground at School No. 6 is any guide, they will get it.