No. 18 on the Top 100 of Ukrainian Cinema: Kyiv’s Animated Series The Adventures of Captain Vrungel

The Adventures of Captain Vrungel (original title Пригоди капітана Врунгеля) is a 13-episode series made in the animation department of the Kyiv studio Kyivnaukfilm (Київнаукфільм), and the Dovzhenko Centre gives its production years as 1976–1979. It was directed by Davyd Cherkaskyi (Давид Черкаський). In the “Top 100 Films in the History of Ukrainian Cinema,” compiled by this centre, Ukraine’s national film archive, from a survey of film critics, the work ranks 18th.

What follows draws on the Dovzhenko Centre’s introduction to the work, the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ЕСУ) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the introduction page of the university the director graduated from, the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, and decrees of the President of Ukraine (as of October 2026). Another series made at the same studio is covered in our article on the animated series Cossacks.

The Adventures of Captain Vrungel, Made at Kyiv’s Animation Studio

The Dovzhenko Centre’s information on the work gives the production years as 1976–1979, the country as “Ukrainian SSR” (the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), and the running time as “13 episodes of 10 minutes” (the English-language introduction gives 133 minutes in total). In the studio field, the Ukrainian-language page says “Ukranimafilm” and the English-language page says “Kyivnaukfilm / Ukranimafilm.” The screenplay is by Ivan Vorobiov (Іван Воробйов), and the cinematography is by Leonid Priadkin (Леонід Прядкін) and Volodymyr Bielorusov (Володимир Бєлорусов).

The centre explains that the work was made by combining cut-out animation, in which drawings are cut out and moved (перекладка), drawn pictures, live-action footage, and object animation. It adds that the series mixed forms that were popular in Western films of the time, such as crime thrillers, gangster films, and Westerns, with the sea-adventure literature that teenage readers were passionate about, and that this was unusual on Soviet screens. It also writes that the lines quickly spread as quotations and that the songs came out on records from the record company Melodiya (Мелодія).

The entry “Ukrainian Animated Film Studio” in the ЕСУ (2013) lists this work as one of the studio’s works that won prizes at all-Soviet and international film festivals. The introduction page of the director’s university says that the series was first shown in 1979 and that the artists drew about 16,000 pictures for each of the 13 episodes.

The Studio’s Old Name and Its Current One

According to the ЕСУ, the animation department was established in 1959 inside Kyivnaukfilm (the Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio) as the “Creative Unit of Artistic Animation,” and from 1990 it called itself the “Ukrainian Animated Film Studio” (Ukranimafilm, Укранімафільм). The centre gives 1991 as the year it became an independent state studio. In 2019 the studio was merged into the Dovzhenko Centre, which took over the preservation of its works. The details of how the name changed are summarized in our article on Cossacks.

The Opening Plot, and the Gangster Story the Director Added

According to the centre’s introduction, the story begins with the announcement of an international yacht race. It is a race to decide the best captain in a round-the-world voyage, and an invitation also reaches the retired captain Khrystfor Bonifatovych Vrungel. Vrungel takes on as his assistant Lom, a student who is inexperienced but always upbeat, names the yacht “Victory” (in Russian, «Победа»), and sets off. But trouble starts before the boat leaves shore (in the Ukrainian-language introduction, the yacht takes root), and the first two letters drop off the boat’s name, turning it into “Troubles” («Беда»).

According to the centre, the gangster plotline was not in the first screenplay written from the original book. The director, Cherkaskyi, thought it up and wrote it in himself to bring conflict into the story.

The Director Davyd Cherkaskyi

According to the introduction page of the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, Cherkaskyi was born on August 23, 1931, in Shpola (Шпола), in what is now Cherkasy Oblast, and died on October 30, 2018. He graduated in 1955 from the Kyiv Construction Engineering Institute (now the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture), worked in his specialty for three years, and in 1959 joined Kyivnaukfilm as an animator. Since 1964 he has served as a director in the animation department. The architects Volodymyr Dakhno and Mark Draitsun (Марк Драйцун), who graduated from the same university, also worked at the studio. Dakhno was the director of Cossacks.

The ЕСУ entry on the animation director Nataliia Marchenkova (Наталія Марченкова) (2018) describes Marchenkova as Cherkaskyi’s wife and writes that she took part in The Adventures of Captain Vrungel as an animator.

According to presidential decrees, Cherkaskyi received the title “Honored Art Worker of Ukraine” (Заслужений діяч мистецтв України) under No. 1024/95 of November 9, 1995, and the title “People’s Artist of Ukraine” (Народний артист України) under No. 80/2010 of January 29, 2010. The 1995 decree gives his position as “director (режисер-постановник) of the Ukranimafilm studio,” and the 2010 decree records that the award was made on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Ukrainian Animated Film Studio. The university’s introduction page says that Cherkaskyi made more than 20 animated films and also served as president of the international animation film festival KROK (КРОК).

As other representative works, the ЕСУ lists among Cherkaskyi’s films Doctor Aibolit (Лікар Айболит) and Treasure Island (Острів скарбів). According to the university’s introduction page, Doctor Aibolit is based on several works by Korney Chukovsky, and Treasure Island is a two-part film based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Year of the Work Differs by Source

The years of three works are written differently even among sources from the same publisher.

None of the sources says which of the years corresponds to the start of production, completion, or first release. This article does not settle on one, and lays them side by side.

The Original Is a Russian Story by Nekrasov

The centre’s introduction describes the series as based on a story (повість) by Andrei Nekrasov. The Harvard Library catalog gives Nekrasov’s years as 1907–1987 and lists an edition published in Moscow in 2017 under the Russian title «Приключения капитана Врунгеля».

In Japan this story has been translated under a different title. The catalog of the National Diet Library has Horafuki Senchō Kōkaiki (ほらふき船長航海記, roughly “Voyages of the Braggart Captain”) by A. Nekrasov, translated by Toshio Sakaki (榊利夫) (Riron-sha, 1959), and the record of the edition issued in 1980 in Riron-sha’s Fore Bunko series gives this Russian title as the original title. The Japanese title does not include the captain’s name.

A Kyiv Studio, and a Russian Wordplay

Lined up, the facts about this work are that it was made at a studio in Kyiv, that the director was born in Cherkasy Oblast, that the country field in the centre’s information on the work reads “Ukrainian SSR,” and that its present place of preservation is the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv. The centre says it has taken on the role of preserving, researching, and presenting the studio’s works.

On the other hand, the original is a Russian story, and the mechanism of the plot is built on a Russian word. Drop the first two letters of «Победа» (“victory”) and you get «беда» (“troubles”), but the same does not happen with the Ukrainian «Перемога» (“victory”). The centre’s Ukrainian-language introduction, too, writes the name of the boat in Russian and adds the Ukrainian translation in parentheses.

How to describe where a work from the former Soviet period is “from” is shown in “Ukrainian Film” Means Five Different Things, which sets out a way of thinking that separates the location of the studio, the language, the present institution that holds it, and the makers. The Adventures of Captain Vrungel too can be written about by laying these side by side, without settling it with any one fact alone.