Ku! Kin-dza-dza

Tolik and Chizhov

Let’s hear it for animated sci-fi comedy from the Russia. Anyone? Ku! Kin-dza-dza is a strange film whichever way you slice it, starting with its title, and the fact that it’s a remake of a live-action movie from 1986, also made by Georgiy Daneliya (here directing alongside Tatyana Ilina), who decided in 2013 that he needed to take a second tour of the territory, what with the Iron Curtain having fallen in the interim. Out went a good chunk of the satire and the darkness, though the kookiness remains in his story of a snobbish cellist and his streetwise nephew who are accidentally transported from wintry Russia to an alien world where status … Read more