Plot Summary
Both the surreal story by Vladimir Gubarev, together with the 1964 film, written in a Through The Looking Glass style. Alice-type Russian girl, named Olya (O. Yukina) meets her counterpart Yalo (T. Yukina), while looking into the mirror. Yalo is an absolute antipode to Olya, for example where Yalo is precise and neat, Olya is absent-minded, careless, etc. The explicit plot relates to Olya learning to see herself differently, but this occurs through an experience in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors which serves as a mechanism for commenting on the ability of a society to manufacture a false reality (propaganda against capitalism?).
The two girls find themselves on an adventure to save Gurd (backward reading for Drug, a friend), imprisoned for refusing to make crooked mirrors. He is jailed by the kingdom's evil forces, the trio Anidag (Gadina, meaning snake), Nushrok (Korshun, meaning Kite (bird)) and Abazh (Zhaba, meaning toad).
They meet Aunt Askal ("Laska" literally translates as the act of caring, or weasel - a word play in Russian), The King's Chef, who helped them on their journey by hiding them and dressing them up as two pages of the King Yagupop the 77th (Popugay, meaning parrot). On meeting the king, the girls realise the extent of his stupidity, and discover who is really in charge (referring to capitalism?). The King's idiocy may suggest that such a system should be easy to dupe, at least from the inside, as the girls do.
Despite, Olya's bumbling mistakes, Gurd is saved, and evil is defeated. Olya returns to her grandmother and the kingdom's mirrors are not crooked any more, implying that it is now a free society.
The film can be interpreted in numerous ways depending upon the viewers own history and the timing of viewing, which clearly illustrates that we all live in our own Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors.
Read more about this topic: Kingdom Of Crooked Mirrors
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