The New Gulliver (Russian: Новый Гулливер, Novyy Gullivyer) is a Soviet stop motion-animated cartoon, and the first to make such extensive use of puppet animation, running almost all the way through the film (it begins and ends with short live-action sequences).
[3][4] The film was released in 1935 to widespread acclaim and earned director Aleksandr Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan.
The part of Gulliver was played by Vladimir Konstantinov, who was born in 1920 and died in 1944 near Tallinn in the Second World War.
Together with other pioneers who repaired the sailboat "Artek" with their own hands, he goes on for a walk to the Adalara's islands which are near the summer camp.
The police chief decides to kill Petya, and instructs employees of the underground plant to make a batch of weapons.
Insurgents are thrown to the sea by armed forces of Liliputia, but Petya goes into action, he seizes the royal ships.
Written and directed by Ptushko, The New Gulliver was one of the first feature-length films to combine stop-motion animation with live-action footage (the first few were made by Willis O'Brien, who was responsible for The Lost World and King Kong).
Decadent love romances, in particular performed by Alexander Vertinsky, were a sign of petty-bourgeois, pre-revolutionary and emigrant bourgeois life, Chansons had to parody them.
The main puppet characters (the Abbott, the Dandy, the Financier, the King, the Chief of Police, the Prime Minister) had, according to Ptushko, "from two to three hundred interchangeable heads with various facial expressions".
[5] Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a good review, commenting that "even if the theme seems to us a little dusty, [...] the execution and invention awake our admiration".
Restored versions of the movie on DVD were also issued by the Retro-klub, Vostok V, Videobaza and Music-treyd company.