The Only Animated Film to be Banned in the USSR
Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Harmonica was the only Soviet animated film censored. Its message—that beauty can resist tyranny—proved too subversive for the regime.
Fear and mistrust shaped every corner of Soviet life. Art was smothered under Socialist Realism, but animated films became a rare space for creativity—and defiance.
Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Harmonica (1968) unfolds in a bleak world of cold, grey architecture, evoking Giorgio de Chirico’s surreal landscapes. A musician arrives in a town rotted by bureaucracy and greed, carrying a magical glass harmonica. The townspeople, controlled by a sinister figure resembling Magritte’s Man in a Bowler Hat, are deaf to his music. Their obsession with money has twisted them into grotesque beasts.
The man-in-black shatters the harmonica and has the musician taken away. But his melodies leave a trace—a single red carnation. Though it withers, a child touched by the music finds it. In his hands, the flower blooms again.
He grows up, returns, and plays a glass harmonica of his own. This time, when the man-in-black destroys it, thousands of carnations erupt, breaking his hold over the town. The world transforms. The people, once deformed by greed, become figures of art, love, and civilization, echoing the works of Bosch and Dürer.
Ironically, this film about censorship became the only Soviet animated film to be censored. Its message—that beauty is a moral force—was too subversive. Its surrealism, too unsettling. Its critique of power, too dangerous.
Officials condemned its "uncontrolled undertone" and ordered the only finished copy destroyed—"chopped up like cabbage." But an edited version survived, hidden in Khrzhanovsky’s safe. You can watch it here.
