I have one of these "40 year quests" too, but it's a cartoon.
Maybe you clever folk will be more ingenious than I've been.
The story goes like this:
An old king's life is upended one day when a beautiful, mysterious woman appears and says she'll grant youth and her hand in marriage to the man that completes some challenges. The only challenge I remember was that she sets up 3 cauldrons: One had boiling oil. One had milk. The last had ice-cold water.
The king wants to see it work first so he points to a random little boy and orders him to jump into the cauldrons or he'd be put to death.
The boy leaps into each cauldron and there's a terrible delay on the last one. The cold water cauldron even freezes over.
The boy breaks out of the last cauldron and has been transformed into a strapping young man.
The king, seeing proof that it works, decides to jump into the cauldrons. However, when he hops out, he's still an old man.
The woman announces that the magic only works once, and she and the stable boy walk away together, arm-in-arm.
...
I've searched for it online a fair bit but I've never found it.
Some details from my memory:
* The cartoon was very short (less than 30 minutes. probably closer to 10 or 15)
* It had no dialog, only sound effects and music.
* A woman's voice narrated it. I can still hear her.
* Now that I'm grown, I see it having a Slavic or Russian aesthetic.
* The woman had black hair and a long white dress.
* The king was very short with a big white beard.
* The boy, when he turns into a man, has pointy boots and shoulder pads. :)
* Probably made between 1975 and 1985
* Part of an anthology (many cartoons on one VHS tape... ours had been run so much that it started to skew and stretch the image)
...
In my mind, it's aesthetically very similar to an heirloom that my grandmother made and I assume that's why I've always wanted to find it.
ChatGPT and the intertubes in general haven't been very useful.
Oh hey, that totally sounded familiar :) Pretty sure this is from Konyok Gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse), a 1975 Soviet cartoon based on a famous Russian fairy tale. The bit you're describing is at 1:07:30 of https://youtu.be/fKc22eSL1gA.
This doesn't quite fit several of the points you remember (very much in line with the post!), so perhaps it was some other edition of that same story.
EDIT: so, I just plugged your description into ChatGPT and it gave the exact same answer, including an identical timestamp! Weird.
The heirloom I have is a small rug and it has horses and riders on it, with pointy boots and shoulder pads. So I'm guessing that's where the overlap came in but yes, this is it! It's "The Magic Pony" and the English version is online too!
I also didn't remember it as being an hour long. This is so exciting! Thank you!
> EDIT: so, I just plugged your description into ChatGPT and it gave the exact same answer, including an identical timestamp! Weird.
In my defense I pasted my post into chatgpt before posting it so that this wouldn't happen, and it suggested "The King's Daughter and the Three Cauldrons" and "The Three Brothers".
Haha, you're very welcome. The ChatGPT thing is odd in how close the answer was to my comment, including specific words I used. Makes me wonder about the likelihood of it being scraped and processed by OpenAI in the 10-15 minutes between posting the comment and trying it in ChatGPT. Or perhaps our brains are just LLMs after all :)
This sounds slightly familiar. Were you in the UK at the time? There was a series on BBC during the children's watching time (pre-6:00 pm, I'd guess, about the same time that Belle and Sebastian [0] showed) that had Slavic fairy/folk tales. Not quite cartoons, but definitely a cartoonish vibe. A little like The Story Teller [1], but much earlier.
Sadly, I can't recall any more about it than that, but maybe it'll help that you're not alone. And of course this could be nothing at all related to what you're after.
> Now that I'm grown, I see it having a Slavic or Russian aesthetic.
Maybe it was in fact produced in Russia or one of the former Warsaw Pact countries? They had their own animation tradition, and some of it was translated in the West (like The Little Mole from Czech is), but I can easily see how such works could be very obscure to English-language searches.
Maybe you clever folk will be more ingenious than I've been.
The story goes like this:
An old king's life is upended one day when a beautiful, mysterious woman appears and says she'll grant youth and her hand in marriage to the man that completes some challenges. The only challenge I remember was that she sets up 3 cauldrons: One had boiling oil. One had milk. The last had ice-cold water.
The king wants to see it work first so he points to a random little boy and orders him to jump into the cauldrons or he'd be put to death.
The boy leaps into each cauldron and there's a terrible delay on the last one. The cold water cauldron even freezes over.
The boy breaks out of the last cauldron and has been transformed into a strapping young man.
The king, seeing proof that it works, decides to jump into the cauldrons. However, when he hops out, he's still an old man.
The woman announces that the magic only works once, and she and the stable boy walk away together, arm-in-arm.
...
I've searched for it online a fair bit but I've never found it.
Some details from my memory:
...In my mind, it's aesthetically very similar to an heirloom that my grandmother made and I assume that's why I've always wanted to find it.
ChatGPT and the intertubes in general haven't been very useful.