Live action with stop-motion effects movies had appeared on the screen for several years before Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko released his country's first animated feature film, March 1935's "The New Gulliver." The ambitious motion picture is noted for its breath in the number of figurines involved in the production, totaling nearly 3,000. The 75-minute film was two years in the making, and astonished the international movie community by its sophistication of its wondrous special effects.
Author Graham Green, in his review for The Spectator, heaped compliments on Ptushko and his team's techniques to pull off such an eye-popping movie. He noted, "the marvelous ingenuity of the puppets are beyond praise. One soon begins to regard them as real people and to give critical applause to the performers." The puppets' creators constructed their small characters with detachable heads, so when a close-up was called for, the heads could be removed to work on the mold expressions of their face, reflecting each individual personality. A life-sized figure of the only human character in Liliputian land, actor Vladimir Konstantinov as a Gulliver-like person, was constructed and used whenever he was motionless, such as when he was tied up soon after arriving on the island.
Ptushko had made a name for himself in Russian film during the waning years of silent movies as a creator of realistic stop-motion short films. He was assigned a team of animators at Moscow's Mosfilm studio to create "The New Gulliver," with the proviso his movies carry the Communist message. The twist in his opening of "The New Gulliver" has young Petya (Konstantinov) and his youth corps friends explore an off-shore island. The team leader decides to read Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels,' with Petya nodding off. In his dream, when the Liliputian military and police decide to do away with the giant human, the underground workers, tired of their exploited condition, move to overcome their oppressors by telling Petya the police plan to poison him. Things get pretty one-sided when the giant makes his moves.
The large scope of "The New Gulliver" impressed international viewers. Charlie Chaplin loved the message and technology of Ptushko's work. Czech director Karel Zeman, who later excelled creating animation movies, was inspired after watching the feature film "to the possibilities of the animated screen." American special effects artist Ray Harryhausen, creator of 1958's "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" and 1963's "Jason and the Argonauts," said watching Ptushko's first feature film had a profound effect on his future career. "I was sixteen when I saw the movie, a tour de force of stop-motion model animation which is virtually unknown today but, at the time, was one of the earliest and most complex examples of live action and puppet animation," wrote Harryhausen in his memoirs. "For me, the movement of the tiny characters was totally absorbing, while the underlying politics went right over my head."
Ptushko not only survived World War Two but continued his film work well into the early 1970s.
