The sixth season of the famous animated TV show about the misadventures of a mad scientist and his grandson premiered on September 4, 2022. To celebrate the occasion, Russian artist Prokopiy Ulyashov released a series of works that features the two characters of the animated sitcom in not the most typical of formats.
On Ulyashov’s Instagram, the characters of Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith appear in the personal style of some legendary Soviet animators.
“For the premiere of the new season of ‘Rick and Morty’, I decided to imagine what the characters would look like if legendary Soviet cartoonists were working on them. I based [my works] on the famous ‘In and out. A 20-minute adventure’ meme – in which the characters Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith are standing in front of a green portal prior to going on an adventure, naively assuming it will only take 20 minutes,” wrote Ulyashov on Instagram.
The artist produced four revisions of the original scene in total, each in distinctive styles of different Soviet cartoonists.
The first picture was done in the style of Alexander Tatarsky and Igor Kovalev who produced famous clay animation, such as Plasticine Crow and Last Year’s Snow Was Falling.
“Rick was inspired by the little man from ‘Last Year’s Snow’ and Morty was inspired by the big-eyed and lipsy critters from ‘Plasticine Crow’,” wrote Ulyashov.
The next artwork is based on the style of Soviet cartoonists David Cherkassky and Radna Sakhaltuiev, who created cartoons such as ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Adventures of Captain Wrongel’.
This drawing is inspired by the work of Leonid Nosyrev, best known for directing the animated cartoon ‘Antoshka’.
The last piece of Ulyashov’s ‘Rick and Morty’ project is done in the style of Soviet animator Arkady Sher, who created the famous ‘Vacation in Prostokvashino’ cartoon.
This is not the first time when Prokopiy Ulyashov, a 28-year-old marketing specialist at Soyuzmultfilm (a Russian animation studio based in Moscow) has reimagined famous cartoon characters according to the Soviet animation tradition. His earlier project reimagined the famous “couch scene” from The Simmpsons.