The Sovi­et Union’s repres­sive state cen­sor­ship went to absurd lengths to con­trol what its cit­i­zens read, viewed, and lis­tened to, such as the almost com­i­cal removal of purged for­mer com­rades from pho­tographs dur­ing Stalin’s reign. When it came to aes­thet­ics, Stal­in­ism most­ly purged more avant-garde ten­den­cies from the arts and lit­er­a­ture in favor of didac­tic Social­ist Real­ism. Even dur­ing the rel­a­tive­ly loose peri­od of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Thaw in the 60s, sev­er­al artists were sub­ject to “severe cen­sor­ship” by the Par­ty, writes Keti Chukhrov at Red Thread, for their “’abuse’ of mod­ernist, abstract and for­mal­ist meth­ods.”

But one oft-exper­i­men­tal art form thrived through­out the exis­tence of the Sovi­et Union and its vary­ing degrees of state con­trol: ani­ma­tion. “Despite cen­sor­ship and pres­sure from the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment to adhere to cer­tain Social­ist ideals,” writes Pol­ly Dela Rosa in a short his­to­ry, “Russ­ian ani­ma­tion is incred­i­bly diverse and elo­quent.”

Many ani­mat­ed Sovi­et films were express­ly made for pro­pa­gan­da purposes—such as the very first Sovi­et ani­ma­tion, Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys, below, from 1924. But even these dis­play a range of tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty com­bined with dar­ing styl­is­tic exper­i­ments, as you can see in this io9 com­pi­la­tion. Ani­mat­ed films also served “as a pow­er­ful tool for enter­tain­ment,” notes film schol­ar Bir­git Beumers, with ani­ma­tors, “large­ly trained as design­ers and illus­tra­tors… drawn upon to com­pete with the Dis­ney out­put.”

Through­out the 20th cen­tu­ry, a wide range of films made it past the cen­sors and reached large audi­ences on cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion screens, includ­ing many based on West­ern lit­er­a­ture. All of them did so, in fact, but one, the only ani­mat­ed film in Sovi­et his­to­ry to face a ban: Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Har­mon­i­ca, at the top, a 1968 “satire on bureau­cra­cy.” At the time of its release, the Thaw had encour­aged “a cre­ative renais­sance” in Russ­ian ani­ma­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, and the film’s sur­re­al­ist aesthetic—drawn from the paint­ings of De Chiri­co, Magritte, Grosz, Bruegel, and Bosch (and reach­ing “pro­to-Python-esque heights towards the end”)—testifies to that.

At first glance, one would think The Glass Har­mon­i­ca would fit right into the long tra­di­tion of Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da films begun by Ver­tov. As the open­ing titles state, it aims to show the “bound­less greed, police ter­ror, [and] the iso­la­tion and bru­tal­iza­tion of humans in mod­ern bour­geois soci­ety.” And yet, the film offend­ed cen­sors due to what the Euro­pean Film Phil­har­mon­ic Insti­tute calls “its con­tro­ver­sial por­tray­al of the rela­tion­ship between gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ty and the artist.” There’s more than a lit­tle irony in the fact that the only ful­ly cen­sored Sovi­et ani­ma­tion is a film itself about cen­sor­ship.

The cen­tral char­ac­ter is a musi­cian who incurs the dis­plea­sure of an expres­sion­less man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addi­tion to its “col­lage of var­i­ous styles and a trib­ute to Euro­pean painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnit­tke “push­es sound to dis­turb­ing lim­its, demand­ing extreme range and tech­nique from the instru­ments.” (Fans of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion may be remind­ed of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fan­tas­tic Plan­et.) Although Khrzhanovsky’s film rep­re­sents the effec­tive begin­ning and end of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion in the Sovi­et Union, only released after per­e­stroi­ka, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a bril­liant­ly real­ized exam­ple of the form.

The Glass Har­mon­i­ca will be added to our list 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 writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you enjoy mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, you can no doubt name sev­er­al mas­ter­pieces of the form off the top of your head, whether acclaimed series like Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion and Cow­boy Bebop to the work of cin­e­ma auteurs like Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyaza­ki. What may cross your mind less read­i­ly is how much these and oth­er ani­me pro­duc­tions owe to Astro Boy, or as it was known in Japan, Tet­suwan Ato­mu (“Mighty Atom”). First con­ceived on the page by artist Osamu Tezu­ka, remem­bered today as “the God­fa­ther of Man­ga” (i.e., Japan­ese comics), it became an ani­mat­ed tele­vi­sion series in 1962, a pro­duc­tion over­seen — and fate­ful­ly under-bud­get­ed — by Tezu­ka him­self.

“It was a stu­pid­ly low num­ber,” Tezu­ka lat­er wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy of the per-episode fig­ure he quot­ed to his reluc­tant spon­sors. Yet despite the man­i­fold pro­duc­tion stress­es it caused, it forced — like any severe lim­i­ta­tion — a good deal of cre­ativ­i­ty.

In time, writes Matt Alt in Pure Inven­tion: How Japan Made the Mod­ern World, “the beloved hall­marks of Japan­ese ani­mat­ed fare — the strik­ing of the­atri­cal pos­es, the lin­ger­ing freeze-frames, the lim­it­ed ranges of motion — evolved from des­per­ate cost-sav­ing workarounds into fac­tors that dis­tin­guish ani­me from con­tent pro­duced in oth­er lands.”

When they were first pub­licly screened in Novem­ber of 1962, the first episodes of Astro Boy were accom­pa­nied by a less­er-known Tezu­ka project: Tales from a Cer­tain Street Cor­ner (ある街角の物語), a 40-minute film craft­ed with an “anti-Dis­ney” aes­thet­ic. At Nishika­ta Film Review, Cathy Munroe Hotes describes this as “the first of Tezuka’s jikken ani­ma­tion – or exper­i­men­tal works – which Tezu­ka made for artis­tic rather than com­mer­cial pur­pos­es. Although the ani­ma­tion does employ some unusu­al tech­niques such as a POV shot of a plane tree seed fly­ing to the ground, it is not ‘exper­i­men­tal’ in the usu­al sense of the word.”

The term bet­ter suits some of the oth­er works includ­ed in the playlist at the top of the post, which col­lects clips of a vari­ety of Tezuka’s exper­i­men­tal and qua­si-exper­i­men­tal ani­ma­tions pro­duced between the mid-nine­teen-six­ties and the late eight­ies (many of which can eas­i­ly be seen in full on Youtube), which col­lec­tive­ly exhib­it both imag­i­na­tive pow­er and a sense of humor. “Mem­o­ry” (めもりい), from 1964, mix­es tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion with Mon­ty Python-style cutouts to depict the yearn­ings of a post­war salary­man. The omnibus Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion (展覧会の絵), made a cou­ple of years lat­er, sat­i­rizes mod­ern soci­ety in ten dif­fer­ent ways, each scored with a move­ment of the epony­mous Mus­sorgsky piece.

By the last years of Tezuka’s life, the style of his ani­ma­tion seems to have evolved in sev­er­al direc­tions at once. “Jump­ing” (ジャンピング) from 1984, imag­ines what it would be like to jump ever-more-super­hu­man heights from a first-per­son per­spec­tive; “Push” (プッシュ), from 1987, uses a more con­ven­tion­al­ly car­toon­ish aes­thet­ic to ren­der a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world dom­i­nat­ed by vend­ing machines. That same year, Tezu­ka — a descen­dant of famed samu­rai Hanzō Hat­tori — also released “Mura­masa” (村正), a nuclear-anni­hi­la­tion alle­go­ry about a haunt­ed sword. The threat posed to Earth by man was also the major theme of Leg­end of the For­est (森の伝説), left unfin­ished by the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989 but lat­er picked up by his son Mako­to: just one of the count­less ani­ma­tors, Japan­ese and oth­er­wise, work­ing under the God­fa­ther’s influ­ence today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Episode of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Of Which Stan­ley Kubrick Became a Big Fan

Jim Hen­son Cre­ates an Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion Explain­ing How We Get Ideas (1966)

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions (1917 to 1931)

Watch Fan­tas­magorie, the World’s First Ani­mat­ed Car­toon (1908)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.