Everyone knows Cheburashka
Saint Petersburg, January 2026 — a cinema with no Hollywood
The cold in Saint Petersburg in winter is total. It settles into the streets, into the light, into the pace of people walking. The Neva is frozen, the palaces glow amber. And on one of the first evenings of January, looking for somewhere warm, we ended up in a cinema.
The listings gave me nothing I recognised. Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all major Hollywood studios pulled out of Russia. What remains on those screens, filling the gap left by an industry that had previously made up around 70 to 75% of Russia's box office, is almost entirely domestic: fairy tales, Soviet remakes, war films. And one title above all others, whose poster seemed to follow me everywhere since landing in Saint Petersburg, on sweet wrappers, Kinder eggs, plush toys in supermarkets, placards in metro stations, pointed in the same direction.
We watched Cheburashka 2.
Who is Cheburashka?
The answer requires a small journey back.
In 1965, a Soviet children's writer named Eduard Uspensky published a book called Gena the Crocodile and His Friends. Gena is a gentlemanly crocodile who works at a zoo in a red smoking jacket. But the character who would go on to eclipse him entirely is a small, brown, floppy-eared creature of completely unknown species, found asleep inside a crate of oranges, arrived from some distant tropical country. Uspensky described his invention as "a still-undiscovered orangivore animal — distinctive features: cuteness, heightened fluffiness, and ear-endowment. Incredibly energetic despite general cluelessness."
He came up with the name by accident. A friend had used the archaic Russian verb cheburakhnutsya — to fall, to topple, to stumble — and the word lodged in Uspensky's imagination until it became a character.
The visual Cheburashka the world knows, the enormous round ears, the wide brown eyes, the small round body, didn't come from Uspensky. It arrived six years later, in 1971, created by Soviet animator Leonid Shvartsman for the state studio Soyuzmultfilm, the largest animation studio in Eastern Europe. The first short film had appeared in 1969, directed by Roman Kachanov with Uspensky writing the screenplay himself. Only four short films were made over the next decade and a half, and yet the footprint they left was vast.
A creature of unknown origins
What made Cheburashka resonate so deeply goes beyond easy charm. The character is, at its core, a stranger. He arrives from elsewhere, belongs to no recognisable category, and is initially classified as an illegal stowaway. And yet — with his instinct for friendship and his cheerful inability to be defeated — he makes a home.
Scholars of Soviet animation have noted that the creative team behind the films was largely Jewish, and that Cheburashka's status as an outsider of indeterminate origins carried a particular resonance for people who had long navigated existence as a "species of unknown origins" within Soviet society. The animation studio Soyuzmultfilm operated with slightly less censorship than live-action cinema — officials tended to regard animation as harmless children's entertainment — and into that relative freedom, Kachanov and Shvartsman poured something quietly subversive: a story about belonging that did not fit neatly into any official ideological frame.
The censors noticed anyway. The first cartoon was accused of ridiculing Soviet construction projects; the second of mocking the pioneer movement. The films were released regardless. The public fell completely in love.
From Soviet screen to Olympic mascot
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheburashka had become something larger than a cartoon character. He was a feeling, the kind associated with things seen in childhood, with a tenderness that precedes conscious memory. Articles about him call him "the Soviet Mickey Mouse," a comparison that is slightly unfair to Cheburashka's stranger, more melancholic charm.
He made unlikely inroads internationally. In Japan, where kawaii culture had primed audiences for large-eyed, round-bodied creatures, Cheburashka became a phenomenon in the 2000s. A Japanese-produced series of short films appeared in 2009, followed by a full-length feature that entered the Ghibli Museum Library. In Finland he is Muksis, in Germany Plumps, in Sweden Drutten. Uspensky's book has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Since 2004, Cheburashka has been the official mascot of the Russian Olympic team, his fur colour changing each cycle to match the athletes' uniforms. Bronze statues of him stand in the Moscow region and in Khabarovsk, in Russia's Far East.
The films, and what Cheburashka represents today
The 2023 live-action film directed by Dmitry Dyachenko reimagined Cheburashka as a CGI-rendered furry creature who stows away in a shipment of oranges from Spain and arrives in a small Russian seaside town, where he meets a lonely zoo worker named Gena, a kind-hearted girl, and a bullied child. The plot is warm, unhurried, and quite deliberately aimed at families who needed something soft and familiar to hold onto. It became the highest-grossing Russian production in the country's recorded history, earning over 7 billion rubles (roughly 86 million dollars) surpassing the previous record in just nine days.
The sequel had just been released when we arrived in Saint Petersburg. So we bought tickets, got popcorn, and watched it.
I had learned about Cheburashka from my boyfriend before the trip. A character that belonged to his generation's childhood, and that the films were bringing back to life for a new audience. For me, the characters of the stories we watch and imagine through as children can tell us a great deal about who we are today. So I watched the film trying to read the peculiarities of Cheburashka comparing him with the characters of my childhood: Nemo, Spirit, Toy Story, but also The Rescuers, The Aristocats, One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
I couldn't follow much of the dialogue, but the theatrical mimicry, the detailed costumes, the pitch of the voices made the story easy to follow. The scenography was striking too: thick forests and mountain passes, birthday fairgrounds full of children's rides and tea tables stacked with cupcakes and sweets, bucolic dachas with wooden sitting rooms and shelves of garden preserves in kitchen jars, modern villas set in manicured grounds where teams of gardeners pruned hedges to match the clean interiors. The story was catchy, emotional, funny, and at moments deep.
The sequel also broke opening-day records and generated its own political controversy.
There is something strange and clarifying about watching a country's cinema when that country has, by circumstance or political design, turned inward. The screen becomes a kind of mirror. What you see is what the industry, the state, the audience, and the culture (in some negotiated combination) have decided they want to look at.
What we looked at was a small brown creature with enormous ears, arriving from somewhere far away in a crate of oranges, learning how to belong.
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