Description:

A little screw leaves his job after feeling slighted by the other machines in the factory. He leaves his job, and the factory grinds to a halt. Based on Nikolai Agnivtsev's 1925 poem.

The original children's book can be read here (PDF, in Russian).

The film was long considered lost, but an incomplete copy with missing intertitles survived at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, which is the version above. An attempt has been made to reconstruct the Russian intertitles and translate them into English based on the original book.

Russian film historian Peter Bargrov discovered another copy of the film at Czech Film Archive. On the basis of these two versions and the original Edit decision list, a restored version of the film was screened at the Russian Belyye Stolby festival in Feb 2015.

Unfortunately, that more complete version does not seem to currently be available online.

Earlier, a version of the film with English & Russian intertitles had been screened at the Oct 2013 "Soviet Silent Animation" retrospective in Pordenone, Italy, with the print sourced from the BFI National Archive. It is unclear is this was the same version of the film, or an earlier version with missing scenes. The English-language program notes by Peter Bagrov from that retrospective, which contain a lot of information about the film, can be read here.

This was one of very few pre-WW2 animated films made in Leningrad that survived the bombing of the Lenfilm archives during the Siege of Leningrad.

Bagrov writes:
A much greater success in Europe than its native Russia, Vintik-Shpintik was sonorized in 1930 (as Die kleine Schraube), with a score by Edmund Meisel, the most established composer of German silent cinema, and was usually screened with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin), whose score is considered Meisel’s masterwork. Today Meisel's sound version of Vintik-Shpintik is considered lost.

Ivan Ivanov-Vano mentioned the film briefly in his 1980 book "Frame By Frame" (Kadr za kadrom), writing that it "enjoyed well-deserved success not only with children but also with adult audiences".