General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

First Squad: The Moment of Truth

First Squad: The Moment of Truth (Pervyy otryad, Первый отряд; ファースト・スクワッド) is a 2009 animated action-fantasy film, a Japan–Russia–Canada co-production, set on the Eastern Front of World War II, in which a teenage Soviet psychic and her dead comrades battle a Nazi occult order that has raised an army of undead medieval knights.¹^•² Animation was produced by Japan's Studio 4°C, and the film was made by Molot Entertainment, a Russian company established specifically for the project.³ It received the Kommersant prize, a special award, at the 31st Moscow International Film Festival in 2009.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	2009; Russia/Japan/Canada co-production²
Studios	Studio 4°C (Japan) and Molot Entertainment (Russia), founded for the project³^•⁵
Director	Yoshiharu Ashino, who also directed the TV series Mahou Shoujo Tai Arusu¹
Writers	Misha Shprits and Aljosha (Alyosha) Klimov⁶
Music	DJ Krush, with The3UG3Reeder⁶
Award	Kommersant prize (special award), 31st Moscow International Film Festival, 2009⁴
Production cost	Three million dollars over two and a half years⁵

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in 1942, with the Red Army fighting the German invasion and Moscow under threat. Nadya, a 14-year-old medium, is shell-shocked in an air raid and, recovering from her concussion, discovers the ability to foresee the "Moments of Truth", the critical moments of future combat in which one person's actions decide the outcome. Her gift makes her indispensable to the classified 6th Division of Soviet Military Intelligence, which wages a secret war against the Ahnenerbe, an occult order within the SS.⁷

The Ahnenerbe summons from the realm of the dead the "prince of darkness" Baron von Wolff, hoping with his help to change the course of history.⁷ The knights it raises are the dead of the twelfth-century "German Order", once defeated by Alexander Nevsky on the ice of the frozen Lake Pepsus, now to rise and fight for the Nazis; the Red Army counters by mobilizing youths with paranormal abilities.⁶ Nadya's own squad has been wiped out, and the Russians use a machine that lets her enter the afterlife and contact her fallen comrades, the Pioneers of the First Squad, to enlist their help.⁷^•⁸

Production

The project originated with Misha Shprits and Aljosha Klimov, friends since high school who had studied at the Art Academy in Munich; before starting work in 2003, Shprits worked as a user-experience designer in New York and Klimov as a painter and graphic artist in Munich. First Squad was the first animation project for both, and they founded Molot Entertainment with the Canadian producer Yuri Stepanov specifically for it.⁷^•⁵ Production took two and a half years and three million dollars.⁵

Origins in Soviet propaganda. The writers drew on the "Pioneer Heroes" illustrated books, wildly popular in the USSR of the 1980s and printed in tens of millions of copies, which told of young pioneers fighting the Nazis; the film is remotely based on some of their images and keeps the names of the most famous heroes.⁷ One character is based on Marat Kazey, the Belarusian teenage war hero posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union.⁹ The creators said they chose anime deliberately to juxtapose two systems of artistic canons, the Soviet tradition and Japanese animation, and Studio 4°C's artists were excited by a World War II anime showing war action, something they noted had rarely been done.⁷

Mockumentary structure

The film behaves like a docudrama: most of its running time dramatizes the secret war, and the rest consists of live-action interviews with actors playing veterans, historians, and psychologists whose testimony lends the story of the 6th Division an air of reality.³ The interviews begin with historically plausible stories and gradually move into the occult.⁸ The Blu-ray release contains two versions: a long version with these mockumentary interludes and a short version that is the film alone; the United States DVD release omits the interviews.¹⁰^•³

Reported running times differ by version and source: Studio 4°C lists 58 minutes,¹ Rotten Tomatoes lists 59 minutes,¹¹ and the Cottbus festival listing gives 80 minutes for the version it screened.⁶

Reception and related works

The film's dynamic imagery was praised at the Moscow festival, where it won the Kommersant prize and drew wide attention in Japan.⁴^•¹ Reviewers praised the gloomy color scheme suited to the snowy Eastern Front and the care taken with dramatic sequences, while criticizing careless plotting, bland interview monologues, and unresolved story elements such as the Nazi twins sent to assassinate Nadya.³^•⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes the film held a 49% Tomatometer score from one review.¹¹ A scholar of the film, Alesha Serada of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, describes it as the first, and so far the only, Russian and Japanese anime feature film, and reads it as an attempt to reframe the official Soviet image of the Great Patriotic War through deliberately artificial, "wishfully falsified" depiction.⁹

The project extended beyond the film: a 2006 short anime music video for the song "Pervyi Otryad" by the Russian rapper Ligalaiz, directed by Daisuke Nakayama at Studio 4°C, preceded it,¹² and the project also included a novel by Anna Starobinets, The First Squad: Truth, and a manga by Enki Sugihara.¹³ The voice cast includes Elena Chebaturkina as Nadya, Mikhail Tikhonov as Leo, Damir Eldarov as Marat, and Ludmila Shuvalova as Zena.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026