A simple story, but charmingly and appealingly told, with great stop-motion characters. The old wolf who can't bring himself to eat the newborn calf he's stolen, and the sultry vixen who tries to persuade him otherwise, are beautifully realised, as are the other animal characters. There are several laugh out loud moments, too, and the soundtrack music is better than on a lot of this studio's shorts.

Whereas some of the Russian animations of the Soviet era ran into a bit of a wall technically when they tried to tell a story fairly conventionally, it's obvious that were much more advanced in the stop-motion department. Actually with this short, Kamenetsky breathed life back into a stop-motion tradition which had existed in Russian animation back in the 1920's. Come to think of it, there was a lot of stop-motion work coming out of the Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War era, too.

Anyway 'Wolf and Calf' is a simple, touching and funny story, with memorable visuals and characterisations.

(Incidentally there isn't a screen shot from this film anywhere on the net, and seeing as I don't have screen capture facilities, I took the profile image with a digital camera pointed at the TV. Looks kinda neat actually!)