Aleksandr Ptushko


Aleksandr Lukich Ptushko was a Soviet animation and fantasy film director, and a People's Artist of the USSR. Ptushko is frequently referred to as "the Soviet Walt Disney," due to his prominent early role in animation in the Soviet Union, though a more accurate comparison would be to Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen. Some critics, such as Tim Lucas and Alan Upchurch, have also compared Ptushko to Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, who made fantasy and horror films with similarities to Ptushko's work and made similarly innovative use of color cinematography and special effects. He began his film career as a director and animator of stop-motion short films, and became a director of feature-length films combining live-action, stop-motion, creative special effects, and Russian mythology. Along the way he would be responsible for a number of firsts in Russian film history, and would make several extremely popular and internationally praised films full of visual flair and spectacle.

Career in Film

Puppet Animation Era

Born as Aleksandr Lukich Ptushkin into a peasant family of Luka Artemievich Ptushkin and Natalia Semyonovna Ptushkina. He studied in the realschule, then worked as an actor and decorator at the local theater. In 1923 he enrolled into the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics which he finished in 1926.
Aleksandr Ptushko began his film career in 1927 by gaining employment with Moscow's Mosfilm studio. He began as a maker of puppets for stop-motion animated short films made by other directors, and rapidly became a director of his own series of silent puppet films featuring a character called Bratishkin. From 1928 to 1932, Ptushko designed and directed several of these "Bratishkin shorts." During these years, Ptushko experimented with various animation techniques, including the combination of puppets and live action in the same frame, and became well known for his skills in cinematic effects work. Virtually all of these short films are now lost.
In 1933, Ptushko, along with the animation crew he had assembled over the years, began work on his first feature film entitled The New Gulliver. Written and directed by Ptushko, The New Gulliver was one of the world's first feature length animated films, and was also one of the first feature-length film to combine stop-motion animation with live-action footage. The story, a Communist re-telling of Gulliver's Travels, is about a young boy who dreams of himself as a version of Gulliver who has landed in Lilliput suffering under capitalist inequality and exploitation. The New Gulliver was released in 1935 to widespread acclaim and earned Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan.
After the success of The New Gulliver, Ptushko was allowed by Mosfilm to set up his own department, which became known as "the Ptushko Collective," for the making of stop-motion animated films. This group of filmmakers would produce another fourteen animated shorts from 1936 to 1938. The direction of these shorts was rarely handled by Ptushko, though he would always act as the artistic supervisor for the group. These shorts were also frequently based on folktales and fairy-tales, a genre which was to become the source of Ptushko's greatest success. He personally directed two of them: an adaptation of The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish fairy tale and Merry Musicians. Both films were made in full color utilizing the newly invented three-color method by the Russian cinematographer Pavel Mershin.
In 1938, Ptushko began work on The Golden Key, another feature-length film combining stop-motion animation with live action. An adaptation of The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino fairy tale by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which, at the same time, was a retelling of the Pinocchio story, it predated the Disney version by two years. The film was also highly successful in the Soviet Union, and did achieve limited released outside the country. Despite its success, The Golden Key was to be Ptushko's last foray into animation.
During World War II, most of Moscow's film community, including Aleksandr Ptushko, were evacuated to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. He continued working in special effects, but would not direct another film until the end of the war.

Mythological Epic Era

At the end of World War II, Ptushko returned to Moscow and created his first feature-length folktale adaptation, The Stone Flower using the three-color Agfa film stock which had been seized in Germany. It was a more progressive and less complex method of shooting a color film than the one by Pavel Mershin, and the film apparently won a "special prize for the use of color" at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. With its plotline featuring a focus on character over effects and the use of mythology as a primary source, The Stone Flower set the tone for the next twelve years of Ptushko's career.
He followed The Stone Flower with Sadko, Ilya Muromets, and Sampo. Each film in the sequence was a theatrical retelling of epic mythology, and each was extremely visually ambitious. Sadko won the "Silver Lion" award at the Venice Film Festival in 1953. Ilya Muromets was another of Ptushko's famous 'firsts' in Soviet cinema, being the first Soviet film to be made using widescreen photography and stereo sound. Ilya Muromets is also widely claimed to hold the record for most people and horses ever to be used in a film.

Late career

After Sampo, Ptushko briefly abandoned epic fantasy for more realistic scripts. His first work in this vein was Scarlet Sails, a romantic adventure story set in the late 19th century. It retained much of the visual power of Ptushko's previous films, but greatly reduced the fantastical elements and the amount of special effects whilst focusing on character interaction and development to an extent not seen since The Stone Flower. Following Scarlet Sails, Ptushko made A Tale of Time Lost, a story about children whose youth is stolen by elderly mages, reintroducing a fantastical element. Uniquely for Ptushko, the film featured a modern-day, real world Moscow setting.
In 1966 Ptushko returned to the genre of epic fantasy, creating The Tale of Tsar Saltan. In 1968 he began work on the largest film project of his career Ruslan and Ludmila, which was also to prove his last. Running for 149 minutes, Ruslan and Ludmila was a film adaptation of Aleksandr Pushkin's epic poem of the same name, and was filled with the sumptuous visuals and technical wizardry for which Ptushko had become known. The film took four years to complete, and was released in 1972.
Aleksander Ptushko died a few months after its release, aged 72. He spent his last months writing a script for The Tale of Igor's Campaign adaptation which he was going to direct despite already been seriously ill. He was survived by his daughter from the first marriage Natalia Ptushko who worked as an assistant director at Mosfilm.

American Re-Edits of Ptushko Films

When Ptushko's films were released in the United States, they were dubbed and re-edited, and the names of most of the cast and crew members were replaced with pseudonyms. While these practices were common at the time for releases of foreign films in the United States that were aimed at a mainstream audience, these modifications were also made to obscure the Russian origin of these films in order to improve their commercial prospects during the height of the Cold War.
The works of Aleksandr Ptushko are now perhaps best known to native English speakers for their inclusion in the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000. The three re-edited films from Ptushko's epic fantasy period, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, The Sword and the Dragon, and The Day the Earth Froze were used as fodder for the show's humorous wisecracks in its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons.
Though it may be considered a dubious distinction for a film to be aired as part of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 series, it is worth mentioning that the versions of Ptushko's films which were used were the heavily re-edited and dubbed versions created specifically for American release, radically different from Ptushko's originals in all but their visuals.
It is also worth noting that he has also received some rare praise from the crew; Kevin Murphy, one of the stars of the program, has professed a love for the "breathtaking" visual style and "stunning photography and special effects" of these films in multiple interviews. Paul Chaplin, another writer of the show, has also expressed admiration.
Sadko and Ilya Muromets have since been fully restored and released on DVD in their original Russian versions by RusCiCo.

Filmography

Original Russian titles noted where possible. See discussion page for source information.

Feature Films Directed