If you had to slap a convenient label on this film, you might call it the Destination Moon of the Soviet Union.
Like any other hasty label, that really doesn’t sum this film up: after all, it didn’t inspire a long string of other films and usher in a wave of new Soviet Science Fiction films. But that does at least reflect its place in the history of Soviet Science Fiction Cinema.
Most reference books will start off with Aelita: Queen of Mars, that strange, Avant Garde silent spaceflight, then leap forward to the late Fifties with hardly a mention of anything in-between.
And there is no denying that Klushantsev’s Doroga k zvezdam [Road to the Stars] (1957) led directly to the series of space films that followed.
But the actual history was just a shade more complicated:
While in its earliest days, the Soviet Union delighted in the Avant Garde, it soon fell out of favor (and it really isn’t that hard to see why when you look at Aelita and recognize that Protazanov threw in such elements as the very real poverty and hardship many suffered in the 1920s and a corrupt official who tries to steal the hero’s wife).
Instead, the State promoted a standard movie style known as Socialist realism (heavy on farms, dirt, and tractors), and simply wasn’t interested in anything as unrealistic as space flight.
But then they launched Sputnik.
The only problem is that Sputnik went up in 1957.
That explains Pavel Klushantsev’s films, and I suppose both Tayna dvukh okeanov [The Mystery of Two Oceans] (1957) and The Mystery of Eternal Night (1957) drew their inspiration from Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (and were perhaps sold to the Commissars as futuristic thrillers rather than pure Science Fiction).
But that still doesn’t explain how this lovely little children’s film got made during an era when the Soviet Union still frowned on anything science fictional. I suppose it was because it was a children’s film.
Or perhaps just an echo of the American Sci Fi of the early Fifties.
Not that it makes any obvious references to those films.
Now the story is simple enough: a group of kids have formed their own International Space Research group, but they are a bit disappointed with their tiny telescope. They also feel sorry for a girl in the neighborhood whose father is about to take a trip to the Moon.
However, his rocket crashes, and the nearby observatory and research center prepares their second rocket to go rescue him.
And, due to an absurd set of circumstances involving a runaway dog and some mixed up boxes, one of the kids ends up on the second rocket.
The idea of a little boy stowing away on a trip to the Moon was hardly new — Fritz Lang introduced the notion in Frau im Mond in 1929. However, the Soviet era movie which is one of the most obvious inspirations for the second half of the film, the 1935 silent film, Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella, also has a young boy along for the trip. However, the rocketships in that film are far larger than the ones here (or, for that matter, in any of the early spaceflight films other than that in the rare Bavarian film, Weltraumschiff 1 Startet which is roughly the size of a zeppelin and carries a huge crew). But then, they would have to be, as they had to lug an elderly scientist, his girl assistant, the young hero, the boy and a few other assorted people to the Moon and back.
Here the rocket ships are perhaps the size of a smaller World War II bomber like a B-25 Mitchell, and despite their basic V-2 rocket layout bear more than a little resemblance to a Military aircraft, with their glassed-in nose and two rocket pods on their sides. They are also surprisingly spacious, with everyone sitting in a fancy dining room (which comes complete with carpet, easy chairs, fine silverware, and a big picture window) for an elegant sit-down meal. However, it soon becomes obvious that they have not planned very well and made no preparations for eating in zero gravity.
Although it does give the animators a bit of fun with all the floating fruit, bottles and big blobs of liquids.
I’m not sure the size of the ship remains constant throughout the film. One scene with the crew floating around inside the main cabin seems to be larger than it should. But it is hard to say.
They do seem to have tried to keep the science accurate, although you can spot a few obvious problems. Once again we get the idea that weightlessness occurs when you get far enough away from Earth’s gravity. However, there is a clever moment on the Moon which has a more subtle problem: the elderly scientist demonstrates to the boy that, with no air to scatter the light, the shadows on the Moon are so dark you can’t someone who steps into one. The problem is that this forgets that the surface of the moon would reflect light back as well — or the suit of anyone near the shadow.
Once they do reach the Moon — which does take a while as most of the film takes place on Earth — the story is a lot like Kosmicheskiy reys, with the Cosmonauts leaping around on the surface, trying to locate the crashed ship. But this is actually a fairly small part of the film, and plays out against the Earth-based story of the boy’s friends and their concerns about him.
And, yes, their attempts to promote him as well.
The animation itself is quite nice, and looks a lot like some of the Fleischer brothers’ work from the late Thirties with the same sort of low key color shading. While they do seem to have used quite a bit of rotoscoping for the human characters, it is remarkably well done and rarely noticeable. The spaceships’ movements, however, have been kept very linear so they did not have to do any 3-D animation. Any time they are in shot, we see them from the same angle. For the most part, the Moon is just a static background, with the camera moving along it, although during the landing, in one very brief shot, we see the ship pass between several mountain peaks (achieved in a classic Warner Brothers way with separate foreground elements on top of each other which move sideways to create the illusion you are passing through them) and, when they depart, the nearly full moon is a model, although it is up on screen for such a short time most viewers probably won’t notice it. The work is superb, though, and I suspect that they must have had a fairly good budget for such a short film.
Polyot na Lunu remains a real oddity, however, as it is so isolated from any of the other Soviet films of the early Fifties. It had been nearly two decades since the last Soviet science fiction film, and it would be three years before the next one. It was made before Sputnik, at a time when rocket trips and flying saucers had taken over American film, but doesn’t seem to have any connection to those, either.
Other than being yet another trip to Destination Moon.
While the Soviet and Eastern European studios would create a lot of science fiction themed animated films during Sixties and Seventies, I haven’t found any others from this era, not even a short film.
Polyot na Luna is a pleasant little film, and I suspect that a lot of children would still find it attractive — although perhaps for the rocketships rather than anything else. Some older Americans may even recognize it as it was combined with Weltraumschiff 1 Startet to create the syndicated cartoon series, The Space Explorers.
But it is far more interesting as an oddity, and as a piece of film history.
However, those expecting a lost science fiction epic will be disappointed…
rivets on the poster 