Description:

A screen version of Pushkin’s fairy tale about Tsar Saltan, his son - the good and mighty bogatyr (knight) Prince Gvidon, and the fine Tsarevna Swan.

The first mention of the film in the press was in Oct 2, 1939, when the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva (#226) reported that the musical score was already completed, as was a screenplay with 200 illustrations by K. Kuznetsov. A version of Pushkin's poem with those same illustrations was published after the war in 1946, and also later in 1949 and 1968 (and perhaps other years).

It was reported (in Vechernyaya Moskva (Sep 14, 1944, #217) that this was the first time in the USSR that actors had been invited to an animation studio for rotoscoping (tracing the footage of a live-action performance). Rotoscoping had earlier sometimes been used for dance scenes in animated films, including Fusspot in Africa (1934, Ukrainfilm) and Jabzha (1938, Lenfilm).

The film was not completed before Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, and production finished after the studio was evacuated from Moscow to Tashkent, in Central Asia. The black and white version was released on Jan 23, 1943.

A colour version was also made, released sometime between late 1944-June 1949, but it seems to have been screened very rarely. The colour version has been restored at Gosfilmofond by Nikolay Mayorov - some images of the work can be seen here. A preliminary version was screened to the public in March 2020, and the finished restoration premiered at the Kinoveche festival in Tver on Sep 22, 2024, and screened again on Dec 24, 2024 at the award ceremony for the winners of the Fourth Prize of the Guild of Film Researchers and Film Critics of the Russian Federation (according to the website above). However, it is not currently publicly available anywhere.

There are other copies of this film on Youtube that are slightly nicer (here and here, timed 34:36), but these subtitles are very out-of-sync for much of them because those versions have a few seconds of footage cut out of the middle somewhere.

Please note that the Esperanto subtitles are ONLY for the slightly shortened version of the film (so it is selectable only in one of the above 3 videos), and would be out-of-sync for the full-length videos.