"COCKTAIL" CHEBURASHKA: MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES FOR CREATING AND PROMOTING AN IMAGE IN RUSSIAN MASS CINEMA

Abstract

The Russian family comedy Cheburashka became not only an example of a successful commercial project, but also demonstrated an example of professional adaptation of Hollywood technologies in the modern domestic socio-cultural space. Against the background of a steady and continuously increasing nostalgia for the Soviet past, a creative product was created in which the audience’s illusions about the Soviet Cheburashka and new Western-oriented, ideologized cultural values were strangely combined, which turned out to be encoded in the characters, subject environment and plot twists of the film. The image of Cheburashka in Soviet culture evolved from an amorphous animal with an unspecified species to a common Soviet symbol of childhood with an appropriate set of existential meanings. According to the authors of the Russian Cheburashka, they created a new story of this character, at the same time, the retroatmosphere of the picture and the set of characters invariably refer viewers to the Soviet Cheburashka. But the new image can only formally be attributed to its visual prototype, since it was intentionally created as a visual and semantic structure appealing to the prevailing industrial thematism and consumer values in Russian society. That is why the new Cheburashka becomes an “Easter egg”, implicitly indicating the presence in one film of several dozen purposefully borrowed elements of images of popular characters from commercially successful Western, Soviet and Russian media projects of the past decades. Such technology makes it possible to fix the prevailing ideological trend associated with the comprehensive assimilation of Western values in the space of Russian culture.

For citation:
Nekita, A. G., & Malenko, S. A. (2024). "Cocktail" Cheburashka: media technologies for creating and promoting an image in Russian mass cinema. Experience industries. Socio-Cultural Research Technologies (EISCRT), 3 (8), 238-275. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.34680/EISCRT-2024-3(8)-238-275