From a soothing cartoon dog to an 18+ horror hit: Leonid Shmelkov's animation phenomenon
An adults-only art-house animated film called "Nepokoy," made by Leonid Shmelkov — known for his soothing online clips about a dog named Andrei — is now Russia's highest-grossing adult animated feature. It follows two travelers trapped in a mysterious roadside hotel.
A feature-length, adults-only art-house animated film titled "Nepokoy" ("Restlessness") has begun screening in Russian theaters, quickly becoming the country's highest-grossing animated film made for adult audiences. Such 18+ animation is a rarity not just in Russia but worldwide, making the film's success notable on its own.
The film comes from animator Leonid Shmelkov, best known for his viral online clips about a dog named Andrei and his circle of friends. "Nepokoy" bears no visual resemblance to those gentle shorts — instead, it tells a surreal story of two travelers stranded at a strange roadside hotel run by an eccentric woman known only as Madam.
Shmelkov, who previously won Russia's Nika Award and Berlin's Crystal Bear for his short film "My Personal Moose," spent three and a half years making "Nepokoy." The film screened at several festivals in 2025, including the Moscow International Film Festival and the Big Cartoon Festival, before finally reaching theaters. It will also become available online through the streaming service Okko.
The story follows two travelers — the calm Yasha and the perpetually drowsy Bernard — who cross Russia one summer in a pink car and stop for the night at a roadside hotel called the Rose. They soon discover they cannot leave, and that the hotel's guests are far from ordinary: one can teleport, another turns into a small pyramid, and a third is a tiger who walks upright. Gradually, the hotel's residents begin disappearing while strange creatures take over the surrounding fields.
The film's heroine, Madam, has already inspired a traditional Dymkovo clay folk figurine, and the film has drawn praise from animation legend Yuri Norstein. Critics have noted echoes of Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," Julio Cortázar's fiction, and the films of David Lynch, though Shmelkov's take is considerably darker.
Unlike the simple style of the Andrei cartoons, "Nepokoy" was animated using rotoscoping — a technique in which live actors are filmed and their movements traced by animators, producing exaggerated cartoon facial expressions paired with strikingly natural body language.
