Puppet animation era Born as Aleksandr Lukich Ptushkin into a peasant family of Luka Artemyevich Ptushkin and Natalya 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 films to combine stop motion animation with
live-action footage. (Many claim that it was
the first to do this, but
Willis H. O'Brien had made
The Lost World in 1925 and
King Kong in 1933.
The New Gulliver was, however, far more complex, as it featured 3,000 different puppets.) 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 (1937) and Merry Musicians (1938). 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 (the film, which was heavily recut and retitled
The Magic Voyage of Sinbad for American release, is an adaptation of a Russian
bylina [epic tale] with no connection to
Sinbad),
Ilya Muromets (retitled
The Sword and the Dragon for American release), and
Sampo (an adaptation of the Finnish national epic
Kalevala retitled
The Day the Earth Froze for American release). 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 (the IMDB lists the tagline for the film as: "A cast of 106,000! 11,000 Horses!").
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 (split into two feature-length segments),
Ruslan and Ludmila was a film adaptation of
Alexander 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's films==