The Adventures of Buratino

The Adventures of Buratino is a 1975 Live-action Soviet two-part Children's musical television film produced by Belarusfilm. Directed by Leonid Nechayev, the film was an adaptation of The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino by Alexey Tolstoy in turn an adaptation of the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Inna Vetkina wrote the screenplay for The Adventures of Buratino, as well as several other films directed by Nechayev. The plot of the film follows Buratino (Italian for "puppet"), a boy made of wood, who meets the children of Karabas Barabas' theatre and sets out to free them. In order to do so, he needs to unravel the mystery of a golden key given by the turtle Tortila. Characters such as Arlekin and Piero, who act in the children's theatre are part of commedia dell'arte. Music for the film was composed by Alexey Rybnikov and the lyricists included Bulat Okudzhava, and Yuri Entin. There was an early interest by the director Nechayev to work with Yuli Kim (then writing under the last name Mikhailov) as a songwriter. At that time, Yuli Kim was banned from television, so they turned to Okudzhava. Okudzhava wrote music as well as lyrics, though only the music of Rybnikov was used in the film. The songs that Okudzhava wrote were serious and philosophical, so Nechayev also incorporated lyrics by Yuri Entin and omitted some of Okudzhava's.