The Nutcracker (1973 film)

The Nutcracker (Russian: Щелкунчик, transcribed as Schelkunchik) is a 1973 Soviet/Russian animated film from the Soyuzmultfilm studio directed by Boris Stepantsev and based partly on Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, but more closely on E.T.A. Hoffmann's novelette The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, the story which inspired the ballet.[1]

The Nutcracker
Directed byBoris Stepantsev
Produced byBernard Sofronski
Written byBoris Stepantsev
Boris Larin
Based onThe Nutcracker
by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
and
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King
by E. T. A. Hoffmann
Music byPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Release date
  • 1973 (1973)
Running time
27 minutes
CountrySoviet Union

Plot

During the opening credits, a mouse soldier is climbing around a Christmas tree with a light. When it spots a nutcracker hanging from one of the branches, it hastily retreats back into its mousehole.

The first scene is a Christmas party where numerous children are celebrating. The female protagonist, an unnamed girl who works as a maid at the household, watches the children frolicking around. A boy begins using a nutcracker to crack nuts, but he is quite brutal with it and eventually leaves the nutcracker with a nut stuck in its mouth. When the party is over late at night, the girl comes down to the hall for cleaning, but the night is full with magic, which manifests firstly in the maid's broom animating and dancing with her. She eventually finds the nutcracker on the floor. When she kisses him, he comes to life and is devastated when he sees what he has become. It is then and when the Nutcracker decides to tell the girl his story of how he came to be:

A long time ago, there was a party at a royal castle to celebrate the prince's birthday, which was interrupted by the arrival of the three-headed mouse queen and her spoiled brat son, who both behaved very rudely and refused to leave or improve their manners. In exasperation, the king entered a secret chamber to obtain a poison against the mouse queen, but was locked in by the mouse prince. The mouse prince then started harassing the queen and the baby prince, and when the prince hit the mouse prince, its tail got stuck under the cradle and was hurt. In retaliation, the vengeful mouse queen had cursed the baby prince, turning him into a nutcracker, just before she was vanquished by the king. The king and queen were devastated, and the entire hall was petrified while the mouse prince escaped, taking his mother's crown with him. Now the Mouse King, he declared revenge on the Nutcracker. Eventually, the Nutcracker came to be hanged as an ornament on the Christmas tree within this house.

Just after the Nutcracker has finished his story, mice soldiers begin to appear in the hall, followed by the King of Mice. The soldiers try to get the Nutcracker, but the girl stops them, leading the Mouse King to shrink and capture her. The Nutcracker brings the toys around the Christmas tree to life, and a war is fought between the toys and mice. The Nutcracker is captured, bound and about to be whipped to pieces by the Mouse King when the girl throws her wooden clog at him, knocking off and smashing the iron crown, the source of the Mouse King's powers. The Mouse King's magic backfires, making him vanish in a puff of green smoke which also decimates his army the moment they inhale it and start sneezing.

The clog transforms into a glittering shoe. When the Nutcracker takes up the shoe, his shell falls away and he is restored to his human (and now young adult) self. He puts the shoe on the girl's foot, and her maid's gown is transformed into a princess costume. The two dance to the royal castle to the music of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; the king and queen are brought back to life through the Waltz of the Flowers, and the girl and the prince pass into the realm. All that is left behind of them in the human world are the girl's wooden clogs and the crumbled remains of the Nutcracker's shell lying before the Christmas tree.

Production notes

Ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who himself starred in his own classic TV edition of The Nutcracker in 1977, included the 1973 animated film as part of his PBS series Stories from my Childhood, of which he was the executive producer.

There is no dialogue in the film, except for a few "chipmunk"-like squeals when the mice vanish and the squeals and laughter of the children in the party sequence. The music is taken from several of Tchaikovsky's compositions aside from The Nutcracker, including The Russian Dance, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. For the U.S. telecast, narration spoken first by Hans Conried and later by Shirley MacLaine was added as well as a version without any narration.

References
  1. Crump, William D. (2019). Happy Holidays—Animated! A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Cartoons on Television and Film. McFarland & Co. pp. 220–221. ISBN 9781476672939.
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