Since just about the beginning of the Soviet
Union in 1922, the nation had a rich and vibrant animation industry that produced some of the
best animation in the world. Soviet animation spans all genres and ranges
from films meant for children to surreal, violent, or disturbing material intended for
adults. Most of it is pretty obscure to non-Russians,
but it still had substantial influence on global animation. The first time period I’ll cover in this
video is when Joseph Stalin was in power, from 1922 to 1953. The earliest surviving animation from the
USSR is Soviet Toys from 1924. It was directed by Dziga Vertov, a very important
Soviet filmmaker known for his 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera. Soviet Toys, like a lot of animation from
the era, looks pretty crude by today’s standards and features basic black-and-white line drawings. It’s not aimed at children, but it’s still
pretty silly and has an over-the-top caricature of a bloated capitalist. Also from 1924 is Interplanetary Revolution,
a bizarre science fiction using cutout animation. Like a lot of very early Soviet animation,
it was unmistakably propaganda and depicted capitalists being driven off the planet to
Mars. The 8-minute film uses a Constructivist style,
which was a Russian art movement that emphasized simple geometric shapes and made unambiguous
propaganda. In 1925, a half-hour cutout animation titled
China in Flames was released, an explicitly political and unsubtle propaganda that shows
how the imperialists and landlords are destroying China, also using over-the-top caricatures
of capitalists. One of the animators on China in Flames was
a man dubbed the "Patriarch of Soviet animation", Ivan Ivanov-Vano. His directorial debut was Senka the African,
the first Soviet animation meant for children. The 1920s also saw the beginnings of an equally
seminal directing duo called “the grandmothers of Soviet animation”, the Brumberg
Sisters, Valentina, and Zinaida. Their earliest surviving film is Samoyed Boy
from 1928, with the title referring to an obsolete term for an indigenous group in Siberia. It includes polar bears and reindeer, and
unsurprisingly, given Russia’s geographic location, a lot of future Soviet animation
would feature arctic animals. In 1934, the sisters co-directed The Tale
of Tsar Durandai with Ivan Ivanov-Vano, and it was the first of many Soviet animated films
adapted from a classic fairy tale. The career of yet another crucial animation
director began in 1929, with a short called Post by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. It also uses cutouts and a constructivist
style. However, Post is not overtly political and
instead tells a story about the postal service. One of the most important films of this early
Soviet era was The New Gulliver, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko. Using puppets, It was feature-length at 75
minutes long and the first feature-length stop-motion animated film ever made. The success of all these films, as well as
the public’s awe of Disney movies at a 1933 Moscow festival devoted to American animation,
led in 1936 to the creation of a studio dedicated to animation called Soyuzmultfilm. It was founded in Moscow and still produces
animation today. In the late 30s and 40s, there was a significant
increase in the sophistication and number of films made. Many of them used an animation technique known
as rotoscoping, where live-action footage is traced over frame by frame, allowing for
more realistic-looking movement. These films also had a heavy influence from
Disney and many were adaptations of fairy tales and folk tales. The Brumberg sisters directed several films
during these decades for Soyuzmultfilm based on fairy or folk tales, like Little Red Riding
Hood, Puss in Boots, and Baba Yaga. In the mid-40s, their films started to get
longer and near feature length, such as the 35-minute The Tale of Tsar Saltan, based on
a fairy tale by the founder of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. In 1945, they directed The Lost Letter, adapted
from an 1831 short story about Ukrainian Cossacks by Nikolai Gogol, another one of the most
important Russian writers. They again drew from Gogol’s stories in
1951 with The Night Before Christmas, a 50-minute film with heavy use of rotoscoping. Ivan Ivanov-Vano continued to direct as well
during the 30s and 40s, most notably with 1947’s Humpbacked Horse. Produced by Soyuzmultfilm, it was in color
and almost an hour. It was an interpretation of a famous Russian
fairy tale poem from the 19th century and the whole thing is narrated in rhyme. There was even some animation being produced
outside of Moscow, like director Lev Atamanov, who worked at Armenfilm Studio in Yerevan,
the capital of Armenia. He made the first Armenian sound animation
Dog and Cat, which was derived from an Armenian poem. He eventually went to work for Soyuzmultfilm,
directing the fully rotoscoped and 40-minute-long Scarlet Flower in 1952. Stalin died in 1953, and Nikita Krushchev
took over from then until 1964. This time was known as the Krushchev Thaw
due to a reduction in government censorship and repression, leading to much greater creative
freedom for animators. The 1950s saw the height of the Soviet Union’s
traditionally animated films and the most popular and successful was The Snow Queen,
directed by Lev Atamonov and inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Besides the snow queen herself, most characters
were not rotoscoped, and this was to give the queen an otherworldly feel, not for realism. The goal was to let the animators be more
creative and Atamonov thought the animation industry overused rotoscoping. The film won awards at multiple international
festivals and even got the unprecedented step of an American release, albeit with an entirely
new soundtrack. The film was very well received in Japan as
well. Even legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki
called The Snow Queen his favorite film and said it had a big influence on his decision
to do animation as a career. The Brumberg Sisters were also still active
at this time, making Flight to the Moon in 1953, the first Soviet-animated science fiction
in decades. In the early 1960s, Soviet animation started
moving away from the prevailing style into more experimental and adult-oriented material. This often meant simpler, more limited animation
and a more formalist approach as opposed to straightforward realism. Perhaps the earliest example came from the
Brumberg Sisters in 1960, with a feature titled It Was I Who Drew the Little Man. It was for children but looks pretty different
from films like The Snow Queen as it had basic environments with backgrounds often just sketched
out or sometimes just a solid color. It also doesn’t contain rotoscoping. The Brumberg Sisters continued this stylistic
break the next year with The Great Troubles. Its intentional crudity is even farther from
the technical sophistication Soviet animation had reached and the style strongly resembles
children’s drawings. Another from 1961 was Lev Atamanov’s The
Key, which also had basic backgrounds and partially sketched-out environments. It had an odd combination of fantasy and sci-fi
with fairies, robots, and a teleportation machine. Also crucial to this artistic shift was the
first film from director Fyodor Khitruk, Story of One Crime. Unlike the fairy tale adaptations that had
been so popular in Soviet animation in preceding decades, this had a contemporary setting. Story of One Crime is definitely not intended for kids, as it's aÂ
Dostoyevsky-esque psychological examination of what leads a man to murder. It begins with a clerk beating two women to
death with a frying pan and then flashes back to show what led him to such extreme behavior. The short uses a much more flat, minimal style
than the realism and naturalism that was found in the Disney-inspired earlier animation. There are few extraneous details and movements
of characters are abrupt, rather than fluid. Soviet animators were still adapting fairy
tales in the early 60s as well, with a notable film being The Wild Swans, co-directed by
Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and his wife Vera and based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. The Wild Swans combines the flat stylized
look with the more realistic Disney style. Humans move in a natural way but almost always
laterally and rarely in depth. Landscapes don’t have a sense of perspective
and objects kind of just float against the plane in an unrealistic way. Other films worth mentioning of this period
include The Millionaire, a story of a dog inheriting a fortune and becoming a congressman,
and Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s highly creative cutout animation Left-Hander. The next era to cover is 1964 to 1982, when
Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of the USSR. The technical and stylistic experimentation
continued, now with influence from the new psychedelic movement, so things got even more
bizarre and surreal. Like Khitruk with Story of One Crime, a director
named Andrey Khrzhanovskiy made satirical short films, with his first two both dealing
with the bureacuracy. There Lived Kozyavin, from 1966, depicts a
bureaucrat who, after being told to walk in a certain direction in the office by his boss,
mindlessly takes the instruction to the extreme and walks around the entire world. His 1968 short Glass Harmonica was about the
stifling of artistic freedom in a totalitarian society and this was slipped past the censors
by also including a message about the evils of money. Glass Harmonica is also pretty surreal and
features grotesque creatures. Fyodor Khitruk kept making his dialogue-free
satirical shorts as well and got in on mocking bureaucracy, such as in Man in the Frame,
where a bureaucrat’s narrow view on the world is represented by a literal frame he
makes for himself to exist in. One of his most popular works is Film, Film,
Film from 1968, a parody of the film production industry in the Soviet Union. Similarly to The Man in the Frame, it partly
deals with the bureaucracy when it shows several different officials censoring the script and
later demanding a change to the ending after it’s already filmed. However, it’s a much more light hearted
film with lots of silly gags. Khitruk also made animation for children,
such as his three adorable shorts starring A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character. The Soviet version is much different in both
style and content from the Disney versions that were also being made starting in the
1960s. As opposed to the polished Disney films, the
environments look like they were drawn by children and the shorts have an intentionally
crude look. Also around this time, two icons of Soviet
animation, Cheburashka and Gena the Crocodile, hit screens in 1969. Roman Kachanov directed a puppet stop-motion
short adapted from books by Russian author Eduard Uspensky, and three follow-up shorts
in the 70s and 80s. The characters have become extremely famous
and Cheburashka was the mascot for the Russian olympic team multiple times. There was even an anime version made starting
in 2009. There was lots of memorable children’s animation
in this era, like the work of Vladimir Popov. In 1969, he directed Umka, a short about polar
bears, and in 1978 created the iconic Three from Prostokvashino, based on children’s
books. Inessa Kovalevskaya directed musical shorts
in the late 60s and 70s like Town Musicians of Bremen and How the Little Lion and the
Turtle Sang a Song. There were even Soviet versions of The Little
Mermaid, The Jungle Book, and Cinderella in the 60s and 70s. One of the most unique animators to start
out in the 1970s was Vladimir Tarasov, who mostly made trippy, colorful science fiction
shorts. He shows a clear influence from psychedelic
animation like the 1968 Beatles film Yellow submarine, and the titular vessel even makes
an appearance in Tarasov’s early 10-minute film called The Mirror of Time. It was Tarasov’s first time making science
fiction and it includes space and time travel. In 1978, Tarasov made Contact, a psychedelic
dialogue-free short about a man meeting a shapeshifting alien. Two years later, he made The Return, another
trippy short, this time about a cosmonaut returning to earth. A decent amount of animated sci-fi was made
in the USSR during the 70s and 80s, and it was pretty varied in terms of style and content. A very intriguing sci fi short is Anatoly
Petrov’s Firing Range, a 1977 anti-war film about a tank that destroys targets after reading
their minds and detecting hostility. The story becomes even more relevant today
as technology advances and experimentation with autonomous weapons increases. Firing Range has a unique realistic style
coming from an unusual technique using two layers of celluloid to create depth. A much more light-hearted sci-fi film is Roman
Kachanov’s Mystery of the Third Planet, set in the year 2181. It features space travel, and colorful and
surreal imagery with bizarre backgrounds and aliens. There was even some animated science fiction
out of Belarus, in the shorts of Lev Shukalyukov. Given that we know SovietÂ
animation was well-received in Japan, it wouldn’t surprise me if this wave of science fiction influenced anime creators
of the era. Perhaps the most acclaimed Soviet animator
of the 70s was Yuri Norstein, who got his start working for directors like Ivanov- Vano
and Khitruk. With his wife Francesca Yarbusova, they created
a device using multiple layers of glass to create interesting three-dimensional effects. They made poetic, lyrical works that were
mainly about animals on the surface but had allegorical resonance. Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog from 1977
was not only one of the best Soviet animated films, but is considered among the best in
all of animation history. It used cardboard cutouts and was meticulously
made, with the perfectionism most noticeable in the extremely realistic fog effects. The short has become iconic, appearing on
Russian stamps and getting mentioned in the 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Miyazaki was a fan of Hedgehog in the Fog
and the Studio Ghibli museum in Japan hosted an exhibition of Norstein’s films in the
2000s. Also lauded as an all-time great is his follow-up,
Tale of Tales, which is autobiographical and inspired by Norstein’s childhood and family. The enigmatic film is about post-world war
2 soviet society and although it is about humans, it’s seen through the eyes of a
sad little wolf. Tale of Tales is non-linear and doesn’t
tell a straightforward story, and also contains some impressive depth effects. In these decades Soviet animation began to
expand more outside of Russia. Armenian Robert Sahakyants
directed shorts with stories and fairy tales from Armenia’s national poet Hovhannes Tumanyan
and other Armenian writers as source material. Estonian Rein Raamat made short films like
his violent, surreal 1983 Suur Tõll, about a mythical Estonian giant. Eduard Nazarov’s Once Upon a Time there
Lived a Dog was made by Soyuzmultfilm but in Ukraine. It originated from a Ukrainian folk tale,
and uses Ukrainian folk songs. The final era to cover spans from the end
of Brezhnev’s tenure as General Secretary in 1982 to the fall of the Soviet Union, a
multi-year process that ended in 1991. Not many popular animated features were made
during this period. However, there were certainly new filmmakers
coming along making some interesting animated shorts, like Garri Bardin, who
made stop motion using everyday objects. For example, he used matches in a 1983 short
called Conflict where the matches act out a military engagement. Similarly, in Bardin’s short Banquet we
see a dinner party with invisible guests, where utensils and food appear to move on
their own. In his Twists and Turns, a wire coils itself
into a man, who then uses the rest of the wire to create a garden, house, and wife. There Will Come Soft Rains is a dark short
film from Uzbekistan based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, a legendary author from the
golden age of science fiction. It’s a dark, depressing tale of an automated
robot going about its routine the day after a nuclear apocalypse. Mikhail Titov made sci-fi shorts in Ukraine,
like Meeting, about aliens and UFOs, and Battle, where he uses rotoscoping to adapt
a Stephen King short story where toy soldiers come to life and attack their designer. Older filmmakers were also putting out plenty
of quality shorts. In 1984, Khitruk released his final film as
director, and one of his most serious, the anti-war parable The Lion and The Ox. It has no dialogue and represents the cold
war, with the title characters standing in for the US and the Soviet Union. In 1987 Robert Sahakyants made a surreal sci-fi
short called Lesson, with lots of nudity and sexual content and music from Herbie Hancock. Tarasov continued making sci-fi shorts as
well, like Contract, where a space colonist is saved from alien monsters by a robot. Contract has an anti-capitalist message and
features greedy corporate bosses. The Pass from 1988 is Tarasov’s longest
and one of his darkest, about a family who survived a spaceship crash on an alien world. Since this is a video about cinema, and partly
just to not make this video super long, I excluded animation for television. However, I will quickly mention a couple examples,
like the Well, Just You Wait! series that started in 1969, and the work of Alexander
Tatarsky, including Plasticine Crow. Surprisingly, a ton of the films I mentioned,
even the feature length ones, are on Youtube to watch for free and even have English subtitles. This has been just a tiny dip into the incredibly
rich and varied world of Soviet animation, so if there are any specific filmmakers or
eras you’d like to see a video on, let me know in the comments.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Great video. Soviet animation is highly underappreciated.
Watch Cheburashka. He’s the best
There Will Come Soft Rains I'm aware of (and is amazing) but other than Soviet Winnie the Pooh I'm not aware of much else.
I loved 'Hedgehog in the fog' now I can check all these out. Thanks for the link.
Great stuff
What's the movie of the very left image of the thumbnail?
A wacky Armenian toon (part of the ole USSR) -> The Fisherman's Son. English title: Wow, a Talking Fish!
Also, a funky one - The Treasure Island.
Tale of Tales is one of my all time favorite animated movies/shorts. It’s available online and is incredible, one of the most heartbreaking movies and gives you so much to think about throughout.