English

«Masyanya» cartoon- short english description

Hi! My name is Oleg Kuvaev. I’m a painter, designer and animator and I’m the author of «Masyanya» character, as well as all other characters in this project and original animations. I’m a freelancer right now and live in Israel. Main occupation- all kinds of flash animation, illustrations, presentations, intros, lerning movies, games graphics and animatied commercials. For questions and proposals — please, anytime, here’s my email or my english website and portfolio.

About this project:

The title character is a woman in her twenties from St. Petersburg named «Masyanya». Masyanya has an oval-shaped head and always wears a miniskirt and a shirt with a bare midriff. Her most remarkable feature is her permanently optimistic mood no matter what happens and her sarcastic attitude to everything around. She seems to be totally cynical and unbelieving but at the same time cheerful and extremely ironic. She is honest and naive, but also reasonable with a keen sense of humor. Seems like she can find something funny in just about everything. Sometimes she’s helpful, but sometimes she’s real pain in the ass… :)

Aside from Masyanya, the main recurring characters in the series are:

	Hryundel’ — her rather dense, good-natured, overall-clad boyfriend.
	Lokhmaty (Russian for «Shaggy») — their friend, a pudgy and care-free guitar player. Extremely naiv.
	Lyas’ka — a fancy girl from Moscow and Masyanya’s friend. Actually Masyanya’s opposite.
	Kolobykhin — extremely stupid bass-guitar player.

Here is fragment from Wikipedia article:

A typical Masyanya episode is only a few minutes long and consists mainly of sarcastic (and frequently absurd) commentary on contemporary russian and common life. Some of the most popular episodes include one in which Masyanya and Hryundel’ snicker and later hysterically laugh while Hryundel’ is recording a jingle on the radio, another involves a sexual encounter made impossible by the lack of «shtuchki» («thingies»), while yet another involves the two main characters exchanging a series of increasingly awful gifts, including a horse-shaped pin~ata and a bag of green cats. The episodes are generally loosely connected, but the characters do not age. For most of the episodes, no particular sequence or storyline can be established. They can be watched in any order, but some episodes lose a great deal of their charm if one isn’t familiar with at least some series history. Masyanya’s popularity is rapidly growing on both sides of the Atlantic. In Russia, she made the move from the Internet to television, and can now be seen on several cartoons and talk shows, although her popularity is mainly supported by the Internet. In Germany, translations are being made of some of the more popular episodes. In the United States, Masyanya has become an integral feature of the Middlebury College Summer Russian Language Program in Vermont.

There are more then 120 episodes of «Masyanya» on this site. All of them are in russian. Unfortunately, there are no official traslations to english. But here are some episodes without words at all that you can watch: