Steklyannaya garmonika

It's an art-housy soviet "animated" film. The people involved claim that the title cards with the story were forced into it by the state. So that commie gobbledygook states that some evil inventor invented a mind control apparatus and then visited an an-cap commie commune.

This animation is the most basic paper dolls manipulation with a music score. And even at that there is not much movement. The stills from it can look intriguing, but in motion there's barely any actual animation.

This is just pop-art clip-art collages anyway. This is no different from the works of Warhol, only the time period of the subjects is different.

Westerners who discovered it through the memes think that it was banned for containing some deeper artistic meaning. But actually it was banned for just being formalist dung, for the use of religious imagery in positive light, and for depicting slave-owning aristocracy as the pinnacle of human existence.

It's not like you can't do equally interesting imagery, but also put some actual effort and make a real animation. "Molten Light" by Chad VanGaalen, or even a parody of this "Steamed Hams but it was banned in the USSR" by Tyrone Deise.

The Glass Harmonica isn't something many people would deign to review, it is a surreal piece that can confound simpler minds despite the fairly obvious messages it is trying to convey.

At first, the title cards explain the meaning behind the story, that we should be wary of greed and the bourgeois, then we are told a story about a glass harmonica arriving to a town enslaved by a yellow devil. From there, it gets more and more surreal, with one of the few comprehensible things being the Yellow Devil, a man with a palm facing towards the viewer that consistently holds a gold coin.

This story is one of how greed is a powerful thing, one abused by those in power. This short film is a piece of art, one that deserves more love.

Andrey Khrzhanovskiy's 'The Glass Harmonica (1968)' is a very political piece of animation, and I know too little about the history of the Soviet Union to make any accurate interpretations of the film's meaning. However, I'm going to have a go at it, anyway. The craftsman of the glass harmonica arrives in a town whose citizens have become corrupted by and obsessed with the lure of money (symbolised by a single gold coin held in the hand of a shifty-looking bureaucrat). The love of wealth has transformed these people into grotesque and disgusting beasts, who roam throughout the streets thinking only of money. This, I'd imagine, would be a critique of capitalism, certainly something that one would expect from the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. When the craftsman returns to the town with his harmonica, the melodious tune of his instrument brings back the humanity of its inhabitants. They break out of their beastly cocoons, becoming beautiful human beings once again; one person offers his coat and hat to a homeless man.

Together, the townsfolk restore their clock-tower to its former glory, perhaps symbolising the rejuvenation and preservation of Russia's culture and history (once money became the town's chief concern, the clock-tower was the first monument to be stripped and defaced, presumably for monetary gain). All this seems like a perfectly acceptable message for Soyuzmultfilm studio under the Soviet Union. However, my research is telling me that 'The Glass Harmonica' suffered strict censorship and was initially withheld from release. There must be a more subtle subtext that I'm missing. Perhaps the film's depiction of a cold totalitarian society struck the censors as being far too familiar for comfort; what was supposedly a critique of the Bourgeois was instead an attack on the oppressive Soviet government. Whatever the politics, Khrzhanovskiy's film nonetheless deserves to be watched for its unique and surreal visuals and stirring classical score. The people are animated as rather sterile painted portraits that only exhibit fractured movements, though they take on a more realistic and romantic appearance after hearing the music of the glass harmonica.