The Little Humpbacked Horse

Sorry I've been off the grid for awhile! I just finished a very large project, and only just had a chance to post this piece. This is a commission for of some of the characters from the 1947 Russian animated film "Konyok Gorbunok" (The Humpbacked Horse) , done in my own style. For this one, I was partially inspired by those wonderful old 70's /80's fantasy film posters. I almost put a title in, but decided against it.

Oddly enough, two days before she commissioned this piece I had stumbled upon the film on youtube and found it both interesting and lovely. Haven't been able to find it with English subtitles yet, but I looked up the folk tale it's based on so I got the general idea. As for the colors, I kind of had to guess, since the video and photo reference were all somewhat different (even from frame to frame, sometimes, because the film is old and hasn't been restored) . The large white mare in the back had some interesting special effects going on with her mane and tail in the film- not fire, exactly.... What's in the picture here is the result I came up with, a not-quite-fire interpretation. I also did a re-design of the firebird feather in the boy's hand, which gives off light without heat. It looked somewhat different in the film, which had this wonderfully stylized "light" around it.

The whole film has a feel that seems influenced both by Disney and the kind of Byzantine folk-art you expect from something from Russia. It was a lot of fun to re-design the characters, and maybe someday I'll get to do singe character sheets for them.


EDIT: Info provided by :iconmj-nj: for those interested:

There are two versions of this movie. And at least three English dubbed versions. Details:
[link]
[link]

You can watch this movie on Youtube and Dailymotion:

English subtitled (1975 version)
[link]
English subtitled (1975 version) - part 1 deleted!
[link]
English subtitled (1947 version)
[link] or [link]
Spanish dubbed (1975 version)
[link]
German dubbed (1975 version)
[link]

Sorry, I do not know where to find any English dub.

P.S. Pony is a boy. This is a problem of translation. Russian language shows grammatical gender syntactically in a way unavailable to English language. So that, difficulties arise for the translator as to how to convey the information about the sex of the person in question. (Read the article "Gender and Translation"[link])