The Sovi­et Union’s repres­sive state cen­sor­ship went to absurd lengths to con­trol what its cit­i­zens learn, considered, and lis­tened to, reminiscent of the virtually com­i­cal removal of purged for­mer com­rades from pho­tographs dur­ing Stalin’s reign. When it got here to aes­thet­ics, Stal­in­ism most­ly purged extra avant-garde ten­den­cies from the humanities and lit­er­a­ture in favor of didac­tic Social­ist Actual­ism. Even dur­ing the rel­a­tive­ly unfastened peri­od of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Thaw within the 60s, sev­er­al artists have been sub­ject to “extreme cen­sor­ship” by the Par­ty, writes Keti Chukhrov at Red Thread, for his or her “’abuse’ of mod­ernist, summary and for­mal­ist meth­ods.”

However one oft-exper­i­males­tal artwork type thrived via­out the exis­tence of the Sovi­et Union and its range­ing levels of state con­trol: ani­ma­tion. “Regardless of cen­sor­ship and pres­positive from the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment to stick to cer­tain Social­ist beliefs,” writes Pol­ly Dela Rosa in a short his­to­ry, “Russ­ian ani­ma­tion is incred­i­bly numerous and elo­quent.”

Many ani­mat­ed Sovi­et movies have been specific­ly made for professional­pa­gan­da functions—such because the very first Sovi­et ani­ma­tion, Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys, beneath, from 1924. However even these dis­play a spread of tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty com­bined with dar­ing styl­is­tic exper­i­ments, as you possibly can see in this io9 com­pi­la­tion. Ani­mat­ed movies additionally served “as a pow­er­ful instrument for enter­tain­ment,” notes movie schol­ar Bir­git Beumers, with ani­ma­tors, “massive­ly educated as design­ers and illus­tra­tors… drawn upon to com­pete with the Dis­ney out­put.”

By­out the twentieth cen­tu­ry, a variety of movies made it previous the cen­sors and reached massive audi­ences on cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion screens, includ­ing many based on West­ern lit­er­a­ture. All of them did so, the truth is, however one, the one ani­mat­ed movie in Sovi­et his­to­ry to face a ban: Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Har­mon­i­ca, on the prime, a 1968 “satire on bureau­cra­cy.” On the time of its launch, the Thaw had encour­aged “a cre­ative renais­sance” in Russ­ian ani­ma­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, and the movie’s sur­re­al­ist aesthetic—drawn from the paint­ings of De Chiri­co, Magritte, Grosz, Bruegel, and Bosch (and attain­ing “professional­to-Python-esque heights in direction of the tip”)—testifies to that.

At first look, one would assume The Glass Har­mon­i­ca would match proper into the lengthy tra­di­tion of Sovi­et professional­pa­gan­da movies begun by Ver­tov. Because the open­ing titles state, it goals to indicate the “certain­much less greed, police ter­ror, [and] the iso­la­tion and bru­tal­iza­tion of people in mod­ern bour­geois soci­ety.” And but, the movie offend­ed cen­sors attributable to what the Euro­pean Film Phil­har­mon­ic Insti­tute calls “its con­tro­ver­sial por­tray­al of the rela­tion­ship between gov­ern­males­tal creator­i­ty and the artist.” There’s greater than a lit­tle irony in the truth that the one ful­ly cen­sored Sovi­et ani­ma­tion is a movie itself about cen­sor­ship.

The cen­tral char­ac­ter is a musi­cian who incurs the dis­plea­positive of an expres­sion­much less man in black, ruler of the chilly, grey world of the movie. In addi­tion to its “col­lage of var­i­ous kinds and a trib­ute to Euro­pean portray”—which itself might have irked censors—the rating by Alfred Schnit­tke “push­es sound to dis­turb­ing lim­its, demand­ing excessive vary and tech­nique from the instru­ments.” (Followers of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion could also be remind­ed of 1973’s French sci-fi movie, Fan­tas­tic Plan­et.) Though Khrzhanovsky’s movie rep­re­sents the effec­tive start­ning and finish of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion within the Sovi­et Union, solely launched after per­e­stroi­ka, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a bril­liant­ly actual­ized examination­ple of the shape.

The Glass Har­mon­i­ca can be added to our record of Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Come Soft Rain’

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian primarily based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness