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Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

each film of Aleksander Petrov is a gem. it is a basic rediscovered truth discovered again and again. and not only the special technique is the explanation. but a sort of spell. Rusalka is a simple story about faith, temptation and sacrifice. but the manner to remind more than presents aspects from Russian folklore, Orthodox Church's life, feelings who are the most inspired translation in the frames of oil colors on glass are the axis of the profound emotion who grows up. a story about Christianity who could be page from the Patericon. but who has the gift to becomes, scene by scene, reflection of yourself. because it is simple - the forms of love, the duty, the voices from different ages, the salvation as fruit of sacrifice. and the beginning of real life. a film like a medicine. useful when the present becomes a mermaid.

a perfect film. seems be a too large definition but it has all pieces for be more than wonderful animation, pure Aleksandr Petrov high work but a magnificent story who remember the Russian mythology, the air of Orthodox Church,who presents , in wise manner, the temptation and the love in its so different nuances as not exactly as show but as touching source of love sense. it has the gift to impress in a profound manner. to give a form of beauty who could be not just aesthetic but perfect lesson about important things. it seems be enough - it is one of Aleksander Petrov short animation. but, like each of his films, it is not only animation. maybe a testimony about force and delicacy, about heart and fascination of existence. presented after a work who could be , for many from us, unrealistic, a sacrifice itself.

This movie is of great beauty, and you can be conquered by the visual wizardry even if not understanding quite well what's going on there. The images are oil paintings on glass, witnessing a rare mastership, and you are like caught by a spell. Yes, it binds its viewers, so beautiful it is.Some viewed in this movie only the Christian lesson: the old monk makes the supreme sacrifice to save the soul of the apprentice, teaching him (and through the movie also teaching us) the ultimate lesson. I think there are more valences in this movie, and maybe we should start methodically, with the title.Let's try an explanation for what a "rusalka" means. She is a spirit of the waters; long time ago she committed suicide after being abandoned by her lover. So a "rusalka" is a drown maiden. She is not properly dead, rather in an intermediate realm, and she looks for revenge; only after that she might be fully received in the underworld, to rest for ever.Let's now talk about the poem of Pushkin, which this movie is based upon. It will offer us the clue. Well, it's not that simple: Pushkin wrote two poems, with the same title, "Rusalka," quite different each other.Pushkin created his first "Rusalka" in 1819. It is the story of an old hermit passing his days in continual prayer, who falls in love for a "rusalka." The attraction proves fatal: the old friar ends by drowning. What remains is a gray wet beard flowing over the waters.In the 1830's Pushkin came back to the subject and started working on a large dramatic poem that remained unfinished. This second "Rusalka" would be the inspiration for the opera of Dargomyzhsky. The story is more elaborated here. A young prince sacrifices the love of a beautiful maiden in order to make a suitable marriage. The maiden drowns herself and becomes a "rusalka." Years are passing and the prince will encounter one day a girl who is the daughter of his long forgotten love: now herself a little "rusalka." And he realizes that his love story was the only happy period of his life and nothing else matters any more. From now on the prince would spend most of his time alone in the forest of the Dnieper banks.And we can ask ourselves: is the "rusalka" looking for revenge, or just for being again together with her lover? It is this ambiguity that marks the genius of great writers.The movie of Aleksandr Petrov unifies somehow the stories from the two poems. The old monk is the prince who in his youth betrayed his love. He hopes now to find solace through prayers and mortification. The novice who stays with the hermit will have to learn the way to God through his own trials and errors.The story calls in mind somehow the movie of the Korean Kim Ki-Duk, "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... Spring." Like there, it is the large water, and the small shrine, hidden in the woods: an old master, his novice, the way toward purification going through the sins of the youth and the remorse and repentance of a whole life. At the end of the movie we realize that each monk in turn went through the same cycle: sin, repentance. Time is circular, we are to follow the same cycle of life. There is no history, just a present that comes again and again, with each new generation.There is this circularity of time that marks also the movie of Aleksandr Petrov. The old monk sees in the novice his own image from long time ago. He is just entering the cycle of life, this novice, and the old monk wants to protect him.So let me give you my understanding of the movie: As the novice starts his love games with the "rusalka," the hermit has a flashback, the remembrance of his sins of youth. He realizes that the girl in the river is his own love that he betrayed long time ago (an interesting detail: the sledge from today's hut appears also in the flashback; to say nothing about the fox who runs at the beginning of the movie, a witness of this circularity of time, of this endless repetition of sin and repentance).The monk falls asleep while praying and in his dream he ascends Jacob's Ladder to find advice from Heaven. The Blessed Virgin is handing him the Lamb of God, and the monk realizes that he got the Stigmata of Jesus: the heavenly advice is to offer himself to sacrifice in order to save the novice. And that's what he's doing: going to the river, throwing himself inside the waters to save the novice, dying, together with the "rusalka," who is now revenged. The novice remains alone, taking care of two graves: monk and "rusalka" have finally found their solace.

I don't think I really need to tell you that 'Mermaid (1997)' is a visual masterpiece. This is, after all, Aleksandr Petrov, whose exquisite skill with oil paints on glass is unsurpassed by any animator ever to have worked in the medium {though I did recently discover a worthy rival in Alexei Karaev, with ''The Lodgers of an Old House (1987)'}. The wonderful thing about Petrov's work – from 'Cow (1989)' to 'My Love (2006)' – is that sense of timelessness about the animation, evoking the eternal bliss of our dreams and memories. However, his films are so focused upon visual storytelling that the stories themselves are often convoluted beyond comprehensibility, an issue not aided by Petrov's insistence upon adapting novel-length literature. The problem with 'Mermaid' is that it only allows itself ten minutes to develop a complex breadth of ideas, leaving the plot so vague and ambiguous as to be almost disposable. That said, this is not a film you're watching for its story, anyway.An elderly monk, doomed to a life of solidarity after a lost love about whom he still dreams, is training a young apprentice by the riverside. This young boy is overjoyed to discover a beautiful mermaid residing beside his shack, and the pair spend much time playing merrily in the water. But the old monk senses in this mermaid the spirit of his lost love, and strictly forbids the friendship. Everything that tales place after this is a little hazy, but there's an almighty storm, a vicious swirl of wind and water and a conclusion that sees crude wooden crosses mournfully lining the shore. 'Mermaid' provided the second of four Oscar nominations for its famed animator, though it lost this particular statue to Pixar, whose 'Geri's Game (1997)' is incidentally my favourite short film from the studio. Petrov would, however, snare the Oscar a few years later with his masterpiece, 'The Old Man and the Sea (1999).' However unintelligible the story, this is a marvellous visual treat that is worth watching at least twice.