The Flying Ship

The Flying Ship (1979) is Garri Bardin's hand-drawn Soviet cartoon you can watch online on iFILM, loosely spun from a Russian folk tale. Poor chimney sweep Ivan falls for Princess Zabava, but a commoner has no claim on a tsar's daughter.

To dodge a wedding with the scheming royal adviser Polkan, Zabava sets a condition: she will only marry the man who can build a flying ship. Ivan takes on the impossible job. Along the way he meets a melancholy Water Sprite moping in his swamp and a chorus of cackling Baba Yagas whose songs Soviet kids memorized by heart. Mikhail Boyarsky voices and sings Ivan; Anatoly Papanov plays the tsar.

It runs barely eighteen minutes, yet the tunes by composer Maksim Dunayevsky and lyricist Yuri Entin outlived the film itself. Decades on, anyone who saw it as a child can still hum the Water Sprite's number. Stream The Flying Ship (1979) online on iFILM.