In The New Gulliver, a 1935 film by Soviet animator and director Alexander Ptushko, a young Pioneer from the Stalin era falls asleep during a group outing and dreams himself into the role of Jonathan Swift’s hero. Escaping from a band of comic-opera pirates, he washes ashore on Lilliput, where he tolerantly submits to being tied up and is made the guest of honor at a feast. Before waking up and returning to reality, the young revolutionary helps Lilliput’s workers overthrow their decadent monarchical rulers.

The Lilliputians are played by hundreds of small puppets animated in stop-motion; their activities give this film its main interest. The idiot king, who speaks in a high-pitched voice, is presentable in public only thanks to a wily stooge who controls a phonograph that plays stock ceremonial phrases for the king to lip-synch to. During a musical number, a row of identical Lilliput women wear unchanging expressions of wide-mouthed stupefaction. Although the film was apparently a success in the Soviet Union, its political orthodoxy is questionable: what kind of Communist message is it that Lilliput’s organized-labor movement can triumph only with the aid of a giant from another world?

Of the legendary title object in Ptushko's 1946 fairy tale, The Stone Flower, it’s said during the film that "those who see it lose interest in the world around them." The film likewise abandons all realism, ethnographic or psychological, as the stonecutter hero goes in search of this grail. He finds it in a crystalline cave that, in the geography of fantastic set design, lies closer to Ford Beebe (the Flash Gordon serials) than to Michael Powell (The Thief of Bagdad).

Shot on the same captured German color stock that Eisenstein used in Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, Ptushko’s film is a study in dense blues, infernal reds, watery greens, and fluctuating skin tones. Some of the phallic special effects are as disturbing as they are charming (the heroine stumbling through a forest of pliable tree trunks; a field of plants that rise on their stalks and bloom on camera). But the highlight of the film is a naturalistic wedding-party sequence in which the whirls of color in the dancers’ costumes obliterate all else in the frame.

Sometimes stodgy, sometimes impressive, Ptushko’s opulent Sadko (1952) is about an adventurer in mediæval Russia who sets out from the mercantile port of Novgorod in search of happiness, which he thinks may be found in some distant land. His quest takes him to Scandinavia, India, Egypt, and finally an undersea kingdom before he gives up and returns to where he started, bearing the reassuring message that happiness is at home.

Since Sadko is personally tiresome, addicted to making broad arm gestures and yelling at crowds, and since his quest is clearly ill-conceived, the interest of the film lies in its visual splendor and its fantastic elements. The most engaging character is a phoenix whom Sadko acquires in a palace in India. A woman in blue perched on a branch, the phoenix has a habit of talking her listeners to sleep while surveying them with the petulant severity of a conceited teacher. (Ptushko’s special effects in these scenes involve wavering back projections and psychedelic arcs of color.) Another highlight is the comic sequence in the undersea kingdom, whose throne room features such hangers-on as a goofy fish puppet and a winking octopus on wires.

Based on the same Gogol story that inspired Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday, but so different from Bava’s movie that the kinship between them is almost unrecognizable, the bizarre 1967 Soviet film Viy is about a young seminarian who, while traveling at night, runs afoul of a witch. Then he’s summoned to the house of a local landowner to say prayers for the man’s dead daughter. Obliged to spend three successive nights beside the corpse, the seminarian is terrorized by the undead woman, her flying coffin, and other manifestations.

The simple, repetitive narrative of Viy and its ready immersion in a world of superstition and magic link the film to folklore rather than to the gothic novel, so that its mood is radically different from that of most Western horror films. The visual effects, which bear Ptushko's stamp (he is credited as supervising director; the film was directed by two of his students, Georgii Kropachev and Konstantin Ershov), are striking: the climactic scenes in a church are a holocaust of ultra-wide angles, camera spins, and various creepy-crawlies. Both quaint and ferocious, Viy is a one-of-a-kind imaginative work.