The Hunchedback Horse

The peasant Ivan catches the magic mare trampling the fields. In exchange she gives him two handsome horses and one small hunchbacked one with enormous ears. The little horse is ugly, but he talks, and he steers Ivan through everything Ivan cannot work out for himself. The tsar sees the horses and takes Ivan into the palace. Then the demands start: a feather from the firebird, a ring from the bottom of the sea, and finally the Tsar Maiden herself. Each is more impossible than the last, and everyone at court is waiting for him to fail. Ivan Ivanov-Vano directs, adapting Pyotr Yershov's verse tale. Fifty-seven minutes. He filmed the same story again in 1975; this is the first version, from the post-war years of Soviet animation.