The cartoon will hit UK cinemas on September 20.
ADVERTISEMENTThe cartoon that has had children from around the world obsessed with a girl and her bear for a decade is going to be released in UK cinemas.
Masha and the Bear is a Russian cartoon, an episode of which is currently the fourth most viewed video on Youtube.
The episode, ‘Recipe for Disaster’, has over four billion views, and is the only one of the top 28 videos on Youtube that is not a music video. Across the show's 15 channels, it has clocked up 55 billion views.
Cinemas in the UK will show the last episode of Masha the Bear’s third season to mark the cartoon’s 10th anniversary on September 20.
The show is based on a folk story by the same name, and every episode is around seven minutes long.
They depict the shenanigans of the main characters, Masha, and her friend the bear.
To date, the cartoon has been translated into 36 languages, including English, and has twelve different Youtube channels, which have a combined 62 million subscribers.
The show even has its own dedicated section of an Italian amusement park, Leolandia, where children can meet characters from Marsha and the Bear in person.
Much of the show can be watch on either Netflix or Youtube, but it has also been launched on TV channels around the world, including in the UK.
“[Showing the episode in UK cinemas is] basically an attention-getter on the market, and the current situation has been developing nicely due to the fact that we launched on the cartoon on the free-to-air channel in 2018,” Vladimir Gorbulya, the ceo of the company that makes and distributes the show, Animaccord, told Reuters.
He added that the company will be trying to break into the Chinese and Japanese markets in the following years.
One of the cartoon’s four directors, Natalia Malgina, also attributed its international success to its use of pantomiming, the art of expressing emotion through gesture and not speech.