TV Series: Masha and the Bear

Happy New Year to all my readers, whether you're sporadic visitors or regular followers of everything I write. 2020 is the 10th year of my blog's existence, and I hope it will be the year in which I finally reach one million pageviews. It's 914,638 at the time of writing this post. Maybe I should start adding the count to each post. Or maybe not. I don't want to be tempted into inserting clickbait just to boost my reader figures.

This morning I woke up and walked into the living room to find my three-year-old grandson Oliver glued to the television. He was watching "Masha and the Bear", a famous Russian cartoon series. Random episodes are available on YouTube, while Netflix contains the official (but incomplete) English language version of the series.

This is the best animated children's series that I've ever seen. It's far better than anything created in the English language today, and in my opinion it's even better than the Hanna-Barbera Tom & Jerry cartoons made from 1940 to 1958. Each episode lasts seven minutes, although Netflix has connected them into groups of three for the English release.

The main characters are a small girl called Masha and an unnamed bear. Masha's age is never stated. She looks like an older pre-school child, five or six years old, but her height is very small, no taller than a one-year-old. Her intelligence and precociousness are those of an older child, maybe 11. Masha lives alone in a cabin by the railway with her pets, a dog, a pig and a goat. The bear is her best friend, and she calls him Bear. She spends almost all of her time at his house.

The bear is a retired circus performer who has human traits, although he can't speak. In fact, Masha is the only character in the series who speaks. He's a loner who enjoys his solitary life in a cabin in the woods. Mostly he values Masha's company, but sometimes he's annoyed by her constant playfulness and wants to get rid of her.

There's a small cast of regular characters. There's a bunny who steals the bear's carrots, squirrels, hedgehogs and two wolves who live on a hill in an abandoned ambulance. Sporadic visitors are a panda, a female bear and an aggressive brown bear. The bear's best friend is a tiger named Whiskas, who also performed in the same circus.

The series is so good that I feel tempted to write small reviews of each episode. At the very least I'll publish a couple of screenshots from each episode. It depends on whether I have enough time. I have so many other big plans for my blog, I can't possibly keep up.