On the back desk

The characters of the cartoon are the excellent pupil Olga Znaikina and the two-man Boris Leykin, who are sitting next to each other on the back desk. Olya dreams of turning Leikin into an excellent student, but he continues to be a doppelganger and mischievous.

The cartoon events take place in parallel in reality and in the animated cartoons that Borya Leikin draws, where he, under the name Barmaleikin, chases after Zaznaikina , invents fantastic cars and travels in space and time. To teach Leikin a lesson (in both senses), Olya intervenes in the plot of his drawings, often turning victory into defeat with one additional touch.

First Edition

Barmaleikin is chasing Zaznaikina through the pages of various textbooks. They experience on each other the law of communicating vessels , multiplication by zero , transition from one state of aggregation to another, Galileo’s experiments on the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a race on cars of all time. At the end, Barmaleikin enters a black hole on a photonic rocket and disappears along with the real Leikin, who, having learned something very important, hurries after new information to the school library.

Second Edition

Having read science fiction , Leikin invents his own time machine project and sends the painted Barmaleikin to the future. There he meets himself from the future, who predicts him a failure in the exam and advises him to better prepare for it. Instead, Barmaleikin goes to the past to eliminate exam topics: first frustrate Newton ’s discovery of the law of gravity , then destroy the rest of scientific discoveries and finally change the evolution of life on Earth. As a result, earthlings take the form of underwater invertebrate creatures, but Znaykina still passes perfectly, and Leikin is sent to sepulation , to sepulation (in reality, to re-examination). After that, Barmaleikin meets his double from the past - the scene from the beginning of the film is repeated, in which he already acts as Barmaleikin from the future. Znaykina, seeing the frustrated Leikin, offers to help him prepare for the re-examination.

Third and Fourth Edition

Znaykina helps Leikin prepare for the reexamination. First, she explains the principle of the parallelogram of forces to the stubbornly distracted Leikin (the first topic of the examination ticket), then sends Barmaleikin drawn to search for treasures on the island of Maly Cayman (the second theme of the ticket is the geography of the islands of the Caribbean), where he meets the expedition of Christopher Columbus (the third theme of the ticket) . Barmaleikin enters the Bermuda Triangle and discovers Atlantis , while the real Leykin is being chased by a UFO . Finally, the exam is completed, and Leikin passed it on the top five (which led Znaykin to a strong shock). The next school year, Znaikin and Leikin are welcomed on friendly terms.

• The image of Boris Leikin is copied from the hero of the previous cartoon, the director of which was also Valery Ugarov - “ Prodelkin at school ”.
• In the first issue, the properties of a black hole are described in accordance with the formulation of I. D. Novikov , according to which the spatial and temporal coordinates “change places”, that is, movement in space curved by gravity of a black hole leads to movement in time ^[1] .
• In the second issue, the plot and individual fragments of William Tenne 's short story “The Brooklyn Project” translated by R. Oblonskaya are partially used. ^[2]
• Figure 3 and 4 issues are quite different from the first two.

The theme of disorder, cheerful defeat, mischief, and injustice arises in the film "Prodelkin at school" (1974), shot with Gennady Sokolsky and Anatoly Petrov; and in four issues of “At the Back” (1978-1985), for which Ugarov wrote scripts with Anatoly Petrov. All these dynamic stories with dizzying pursuits and transformations at the same time pursued cognitive and educational goals.

- Sergey Kapkov ^[3]

The cartoon has been repeatedly published on DVD in cartoon collections: “Hello, school!” (“Soyuzmultfilm”), “I don't want to go to school” (“Soyuzmultfilm”, distributor of “Close-up”).

• Ugarov V. At the rear desk. - M .: All-Union Bureau of Propaganda for Motion Picture Arts, 1985. - 16 p. - (The film is a fairy tale). Cartoon comic book.

• Prodelkin at school

• "On the back desk" on " Animator.ru "
• "On the back desk" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema"
• TEXTS: Valery Ugarov - Encyclopedia of Russian cinema (inaccessible link)