Studio: experimental animation workshop at the State Technical College of Cinematography (GTK), with Mezhrabpom-Rus
Short Synopsis
Frightened by the advance of the proletariat across the Earth, the capitalists of all nations climb into a spaceship shaped like a shoe, carrying their plundered gold, and flee into space; the ship is swallowed by the sun. The "red warrior, Comrade Kominternov", goes after them in a rocket of his own and lands on Mars, a futurist planet of towers and machines where the workers are oppressed by fat, cigar-smoking Martian bourgeois. Kominternov leads them in a revolution, the Martian capitalists are routed in a series of grotesque transformations, and the red flag flies over the planet. The film's subtitle, in the rhymed style of a folk tale, promises exactly this: how the red warrior flew after the bourgeois and chased them all off Mars.
Why It Matters
- The design is wild: cut-out figures, collage and drawn animation mixed together, the capitalists swelling and bursting, the Martian city built of constructivist shapes, and a sequence in which Kominternov's rocket is launched by the combined breath of the world's workers. It looks like a Soviet poster come to life, which is what its makers intended.
- It was one of the very first Soviet animated films, made as a reply to Yakov Protazanov's Aelita, the live-action Martian epic of the same year, and it founded the group that became the Soviet cartoon studio. Khodataev went on to a long career; the film itself became a staple of histories of political animation.
Notes and Trivia
- One moustached military figure among the Martian bourgeois is a caricature of the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski.
- The film was planned as an insert for Aelita and released separately when that fell through.
- See also: Soviet Toys (1924).