Fyodor Khitruk

Fyodor Khitruk's, The Story of a Crime (1962)

Follows friendly and humble accountant as rude neighbors drive him to commit a crime - can selfishness and domestic disruption destroy society?

[When Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 proclaimed the end of the personality cult of Joseph Stalin, he started a process of political and cultural renewal in the country. Even though animators still needed a while to free themselves from the long tradition of "Éclair", from the 1960s onwards, animation films gain completely new qualities. The starting point for this was Fyodor Khitruk's film The Story of a Crime (1962). Not only had he changed the animation style to something that resembled what the United Productions of America was doing, but for the first time since theavantgarde years, he was able to tackle a contemporary story.]

Новый Гулливер (New Gulliver) 1935

Clip from the first feature length animated film conceived in Russia, by Aleksandr Ptushko in 1935.  

[He was a trained architect, but earlier in his life had worked in mechanical engineering. In this field, he is known for the invention of an adding machine that was in use in the Soviet Union until the 1970s (an example of it can be seen in Fyodor Khitruk's first film as a director, The Story of a Crime of 1962). When he joined the puppet animation unit of Mosfilm, he found an ideal environment to live out his mechanical ambitions as well as his artistic ones, and became internationally renowned with the Soviet Union's first feature-length animated film, The New Gulliver (1935). This film mixes puppet animation and live acting. It is an explicitly ideological retelling of Jonathan Swift's novel. It nevertheless is considered a masterpiece of animation, featuring mass scenes with hundreds of extras, very expressive mimics in close-ups, and innovative, flexible camera work combined with excellent scenography. ]