The Tale of Tsar Saltan
About The Tale of Tsar Saltan
Tsar Saltan marries the youngest of three sisters and sets the older two to cook and weave. While he is away at war they have the tsaritsa and the baby, Prince Gvidon, sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea. Cast up on the island of Buyan, Gvidon saves an enchanted swan from a kite. Homesick, he goes back to Saltan's court in insect shape, first as a mosquito and then as a fly.
Cast & crew
More about The Tale of Tsar Saltan
The Brumberg sisters wrote and directed Pushkin's 1831 poem as a drawn film, rotoscoped from actors and then painted. Part of the work was done while Soyuzmultfilm was evacuated to Samarkand. Color used Pavel Mershin's chrome-gelatin process. The black-and-white version opened on 23 January 1943; the color print had to wait on Mosfilm's color laboratory and could not be issued before the end of 1944. The archive length is 1,012 meters, four parts, 36 minutes 6 seconds.
Themes
Background
Soyuzmultfilm finished it during the war, alongside shorts such as The New Year Tree and The Stolen Sun, when stock and staff were short.
Look
Nikolai Sokolov shot the black-and-white version and Yefim Gimpelson the color version. Figures were traced from live actors, the éclair method.
Technique
Color was printed by Pavel Mershin's chrome-gelatin process from a three-strip negative.
Music
Viktor Oransky composed the score.
Preservation
Nikolai Mayorov restored the color at his own expense, with some support from the Union of Cinematographers. A work print was shown on 14 March 2020 at the New Tretyakov Gallery. The restored color print premiered on 22 September 2024 in Tver at the Kinovecher festival, and the full restoration was shown at the House of Cinema in Moscow on 25 December 2024.
Notes
- Mikhail Zharov voices Saltan, Faina Ranevskaya the matchmaker Babarikha, Maria Babanova the Swan Princess, Faina Shevchenko the cook, Klavdiya Koreneva the weaver, and Leonid Pirogov Chernomor.
- Konstantin Kuznetsov was the production designer. Fyodor Khitruk animated and is not in the credits.
- For a long time viewers had only the black-and-white negative.
- The archive project Firsts in Cinema calls it the first Soviet feature-length drawn cartoon.
Scenes
- The tsaritsa and Gvidon are sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea.
- Gvidon saves the swan from the kite.
- He enters Saltan's court as a mosquito.
Influenced by
- Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831)
