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Aleksandr Ptushko
Summary
Aleksandr Lukich Ptushko (Александр Лукич Птушко, – 6 March 1973) was a Soviet animation and fantasy film director, and a People's Artist of the USSR (1969). Ptushko is frequently (and somewhat misleadingly) referred to as "the Soviet Walt Disney," because of his prominent early role in animation in the Soviet Union, though a more accurate comparison would be to Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen. Some critics, such as Tim Lucas and Alan Upchurch, have also compared Ptushko to Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, who made fantasy and horror films with similarities to Ptushko's work and made similarly innovative use of color cinematography and special effects. He began his film career as a director and animator of stop-motion short films, and became a director of feature-length films combining live-action, stop-motion, creative special effects, and Russian mythology. Along the way he would be responsible for a number of firsts in Russian film history (including the first feature-length animated film, and the first film in color), and would make several extremely popular and internationally praised films full of visual flair and spectacle.
Born as Aleksandr Lukich Ptushkin into a peasant family of Luka Artemievich Ptushkin and Natalia Semyonovna Ptushkina. He studied in the realschule, then worked as an actor and decorator at the local theater. In 1923 he enrolled into the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics which he finished in 1926.
Aleksandr Ptushko began his film career in 1927 by gaining employment with Moscow's Mosfilm studio. He began as a maker of puppets for stop-motion animated short films made by other directors, and rapidly became a director of his own series of silent puppet films featuring a character called Bratishkin. From 1928 to 1932, Ptushko designed and directed several of these "Bratishkin shorts." During these years, Ptushko experimented with various animation techniques, including the combination of puppets and live action in the same frame, and became well known for his skills in cinematic effects work.
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