Happy Cartoon Music ... Soviet Style!

You want lightness and brightness? Try zesty musical scores for cartoons in the Workers' Paradise.

Twentieth-century Russian music is often thought of as dark and brooding, a reflection of life under the thumb of a brutal state. ... Yet many of the same composers whose concert works often reflected a dark reality also wrote cartoon music for kids. ... Composer Dmitri Shostakovich turned out a merry cartoon score: "The Silly Little Mouse." ... The music for "Vinny Pookh" [the Russian version of Winnie the You-Know-Who] was penned by Mieczysław Weinberg, a Jewish composer who fled his native Poland in 1939 and headed east to the Soviet Union. ...

NPR has a tasty little piece on that Russian cartoon music -- complete with samples -- up top at the link. Until I listened to the story, I had no idea that Soviet animators had done their own version of "Winnie the Pooh" a full decade before the first Disney version.

I wonder if there are copyright issues?