Konyok-gorbunok (1941)
aka Humpbacked Horse
Article 5876 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-30-2020
Directed by Aleksandr Rou
Featuring Pyotr Aleynikov, Marina Kovalyova, Georgiy Millyar
Country: Soviet Union
What it is: Russian fantasy

A peasant boy who cares for a magical horse is given impossible tasks by a tsar.

There’s plenty of fantastic content in this Russian fantasy; I wish I could say more about the story, though, but since my copy of the movie was in unsubtitled Russian, I had only visuals to go on. The visuals are very striking, particularly in scenes where the peasant boy has to meet up with a variety of giant characters in any number of strange environments. But many of the plot elements are buried in the dialogue, so I only have a vague notion of what’s going on. I’ll probably find out eventually; there are other versions of this story out there. As it is, there’s quite a bit of fantasy eye-candy in this one, and it looks like it could be a bit of fun, though some of the acting comes across as very stagebound.