Twelve Months

A young queen asks for a bunch of snowdrops for New Year’s Day and promises a reward. A greedy woman sends the stepdaughter she dislikes out into a freezing forest, knowing full well the task is impossible. The girl is close to freezing to death when the spirits of the Twelve Months appear and make spring around her. She gets the flowers to the queen, but others turn up wanting a share of the reward. The film adapts Samuil Marshak’s fairy tale of the same name and was made as a co-production between Toei Animation in Japan and Soyuzmultfilm in the Soviet Union, one of the rare works where those two animation traditions met. It is as much a tale about the cost of disturbing the order of the seasons as about a wronged child being rescued.