Director Andreas Deja, who has over 30 years experience animating at Disney, has announced his film, Mushka, will be released on streaming/VOD on December 15th. Mushka, a 28-minute long hand-drawn animated film, first premiered at the San Fransisco International Film Festival in 2023. It went on to win awards at the Palm Springs International ShortFest, San Jose International Short Film Festival, and the Encounters Film Festival in the UK.

Mushka takes place in Ukraine in the 1970’s. A young girl named Sarah finds an orphaned Siberian tiger cub. Seeing an “M” pattern on his forehead, she names him “Mushka”, a Russian term of endearment. She raises him to adulthood and has to protect him from those who would try to profit off him.

Polish born and German raised Andreas Deja has a long history in animation. He began at Disney on The Black Cauldron (1985) at age 20. He has since worked on dozens of Disney films and shorts as a character designer, animator, and supervisor. Given that he supervised the animation of Scar from The Lion King, Deja writing and directing a short about a tiger is a natural fit. Citing the original 101 Dalmatians as an inspiration, Deja opted for 2D hand drawn animation for Mushka and took about 10 years to complete it.

Mushka stars Helena Aviv Perez as Sarah and features voices of Tanner Beard, Ariel Goldberg, Josh Allen Goldman, and Kelly Hoover. Andreas Deja directed and wrote it, sharing a story by credit with Michael McKinney. Mushka is notable for being one of the final films worked on by legendary composer Richard Sherman, who passed away in 2024. Sherman, an Academy Award winner and half of the famous Sherman Brothers duo, has a decades long history of scoring for animated films, dating all the way back to 1963 with the Sword in the Stone.

Mushka is an independent short produced by Andreas Deja, Craig Peck, and Roger Viloria. While Mushka releases on VOD everywhere December 15th, the original score, including “Mushka’s Lullaby”, is already available via Lakeshore Records.

 

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