The Little Screw

1927 Animation 11 minutes Directed by Vladislav Tvardovskiy

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About The Little Screw

At a factory the dynamo, the flywheel, and the gears boast that they are the heroes of the work. A small screw, Vintik-Shpintik, does his job and is ignored. He walks out. The next day the plant stops. The machines apologize, and he goes back to his place.

Cast & crew

More about The Little Screw

Vladislav Tvardovsky directed it in 1927 at the Leningrad Sovkino factory, from Nikolai Agnivtsev's poem "Vintik-Shpuntik." Tvardovsky had already drawn the 1925 Raduga edition of that poem. Animator.ru lists the animators as Alexander Presnyakov, V. Kuklin, Igor Sorokhtin, and S. Zhukov, with Bocharov on the camera.

Themes

  • a part the machines ignore
  • a factory that stops
  • an apology from the big parts
  • screw
  • dynamo
  • flywheel
  • gears
  • factory
  • cut-out animation
  • Agnivtsev

Background

Agnivtsev's book came out in 1925, during the New Economic Policy. The film followed in 1927, the year before the first Five-Year Plan.

Making

Ivan Ivanov-Vano, in Kadr za kadrom (1980), called it a modern fairy tale that used Agnivtsev's verse and that played to adults as well as children.

Reviews

Ivanov-Vano wrote that the idea mattered and that the short had a real success with both children and grown viewers.

Look

Bocharov photographed the factory scenes and the articulated machine figures.

Music

The 1927 release was silent. Edmund Meisel scored a German version in 1931; that recording does not survive.

Preservation

An incomplete print without titles is at Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands. In 2015 the Belye Stolby archive-film festival showed intertitles rebuilt from the cutting continuity, plus two fragments from the Národní filmový archiv in Prague.

Notes

  • The Russian title is Винтик-шпинтик. The poem's title uses шпунтик.
  • The Russian Wikipedia entry describes cut-out animation, drawn animation, and jointed machine figures.
  • Animator.ru files it as a drawn film and notes a German sound version made in 1931.
  • Edmund Meisel wrote that 1931 score. The track is lost.
  • In Soviet reference the picture was treated as lost.

Scenes

  • The dynamo, flywheel, and gears claim the credit.
  • The morning after the screw leaves, the factory is stopped.

Influenced by

  • Nikolai Agnivtsev's poem Vintik-Shpuntik (1925)