The Nazis manage to summon the spirit of the mighty Prince of Darkness, Baron von Wolff from the kingdom of the dead. Only Nadya and her friends, pioneers from the “First Squad”, can withstand the fascists.

Balancing on seriousness and playfulness, Russian scriptwriters/producers Misha Shprits and Alyosha Klimov say working on the anime was a blast.

“We were mainly trying to get a kick out of what we were doing just on a personal level, and not really concentrate much on what possible audiences, wherever they may be, would think or feel. On the other hand, conceptually speaking we took the stereotypes of the Soviet era, reinterpreted them with the means of the visual language of contemporary Japanese animation. Along the way, any type of ideological messaging was entirely irrelevant to us,” Misha Shprits told RT.

The anime is a fusion of fact and fiction and is not meant to serve as a lesson in history.

Directed by one of Japan’s best animation artists Yosiharu Ashino, “First Squad” is a piece of visual art peppered with humor and with music by DJ Krush.

 “The Japanese artist we worked with never went to Russia before and didn’t know a lot about the country, so we wanted to avoid stereotypes from the very beginning. The project was aimed at the Russian audiences in the first place and then at the rest of the world. We knew that our Russian viewers would be very sensitive about all kinds of stereotypes, because we saw how many mistakes and wrong decisions were made by our colleagues who tried to deal with this theme. So that’s why we were involved in each process that took place in Japan,” Alyosha Klimov explained.

Misha and Alyosha say, they came up with the idea for “First Squad” about five years ago, sitting in a pizza parlor in Munich.

The authors of the movie were pioneers themselves, and thought it would be worth the effort to pay tribute to their Soviet past.

The Russian-Japanese anime has already received accolades from art critics in Russia and overseas, and has been screened at the world’s most prestigious film festival, Cannes, proving in “First Squad” reward and effort do keep company.

Valeria Paikova, RT