Artist, director, and Masyanya creator Oleg Kuvaev told Novaya-Europe about his work with neural networks, new episodes of the animated series, and plans for a feature-length musical project. He said that in his youth he was involved in both music and drawing, and that the band Splean, as he put it, effectively started in his apartment, but he later deliberately chose visual art.
Kuvaev said that he now channels his interest in music into videos made with artificial intelligence. He described the project as non-commercial and said he is driven by the desire to try things no one had done before. He compared the current fascination with AI to the moment when the internet and Flash animation opened new possibilities for Masyanya.
Speaking about the video “Pust vsegda”, based on the melody of the Soviet-era song “Sunny Circle,” Kuvaev said he wanted to show how, in his view, an aggressor state turns familiar moral principles upside down. He called “Kokainetochka”, built on Alexander Vertinsky’s 1916 lyrics, a symbol of a ruined Russian culture that, in his assessment, has become painful to engage with after the war and the political loyalty of some of its figures to dictatorship.
According to Kuvaev, working with neural networks is far from easy: different models, he said, constantly “argue” with the author about character movement, facial expressions, and scene details. At the same time, he believes such systems show signs of intelligence, though not human intelligence. As an example, he described getting around built-in censorship by asking the model to “cover everything with red paint” instead of depicting blood.
Kuvaev also said that Masyanya cannot be replaced by AI any time soon. In his view, intuition, humor, and the many shades of sarcasm remain especially difficult for machines. New episodes are still funded through crowdfunding: patrons vote on ideas, but he keeps the final creative decisions for himself.
A new episode, “Satrap Expo”, about an “exhibition of the achievements of dictatorial economy,” was recently released on his channel. Kuvaev said he had first imagined a more tragic ending in which Masyanya sacrifices herself, but later chose a more ironic resolution. He added that patrons voted for the next episode to be an absurd comedy because audiences are tired of death and war.
He also said he is writing a screenplay for a feature project with the working title Back to common sense. He described it as an absurd musical comedy and said he hopes to make the first musical created with AI, while acknowledging that current technology, especially in choral singing, is not yet strong enough for that.