If you need any more proof that the Cold War is over—no really it is!—look no further than the House that a Mouse built, for Walt Disney Pictures is throwing their hard-earned Mickey money at a locally produced Russian film called Kniga Masterov, aka The Book of Masters if you don’t speak Russian or didn’t take a comparative lit course in college. (For the record, I’m a member of both groups.) Masters will be a children’s adventure based on Russian fairy tales and characters written and directed by Vadim Sokolovsky, Disney’s head of acquisitions and production in Russia.
Part of me likes the idea of Disney teaming up with foreign movie houses to release films geared towards children about their own culture and/or ethnic backgrounds. If Disney had come out with a movie that was the dramatic tale of how a bunch of natives rose up against the cruel foreigner who was talked into killing their leader by his rival and struck him in the back with a spear when I was a kid, I think I might have actually been more tempted to learn Tagalog.
As it is, Disney’s backing of this film will do wondrous things for their bottom line because if the movie’s only going to cost $7 million USD to make and there are about 141 million people in Russia, (based on the average cost of a movie ticket in Russia, carry the one…) the only people who would need to see this film would be everyone in Moscow, and the rest of the country can just put their feet up.