The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights (cartoon)

There lived a king and a queen. The king left for 1 year. While the king was absent, her daughter was born. The queen dies when the king returns home. He grieves, but a year passes, and a new queen appears in the palace. She is very beautiful, but cruel, wayward and envious. The queen has a magic mirror that speaks to her. When the queen looks in the mirror, she asks him:

My light, a mirror! tell me
Yes, tell the whole truth:
I am sweeter in the world
All blush and whiter?

From year to year, the mirror answers that there is no one more beautiful than the queen in the whole world. But years go by, and the queen is no longer young. But her stepdaughter, on the contrary, is growing up and becoming more beautiful. One fine day, the mirror declares to the queen that she is beautiful, but there is one that is much more beautiful:

You are beautiful, no doubt;
But the princess is sweeter than everyone
All blush and whiter.

The nature of the queen makes itself felt, and envy of the main character has no limits. The queen calls her servant Chernavka and orders her:

You are a princess in the wilderness
Take it away. Linking, live
Leave it under the pine tree
To be eaten by wolves.

Fulfilling the order of the queen, Chernavka leads the princess into the forest, but does not wish her harm. She only fulfills the order of the mistress and therefore releases the princess. Then Chernavka returns to the queen and informs her of the death of the princess.

The king, upon learning of the loss of his daughter, is grieving. The bridegroom of the princess, Prince Elisha, sets off around the world in search of the missing bride. The latter wanders for a long time through the dense forest and as a result, in the thicket, finds a large house. The princess enters there, but the owners are not at home. By evening, they appear. These are seven brothers-heroes. The princess tells what happened to her, and the heroes leave her to live in their house.

The main character runs a housework. The heroes liked her. The latter offer her to choose one of them as her husband. The princess replies that all the heroes are nice to her, but she already has a fiancé, and she is forced to refuse. In the meantime, the queen, thinking that her stepdaughter had long been dead, asked the mirror:

I am sweeter in the world
All blush and whiter?

The mirror answers that the queen is without a doubt beautiful, but the princess is still more beautiful. Then the queen decides to end her stepdaughter herself. She disguises herself as an old woman, goes to the forest to look for the princess and finds the house of seven heroes. The princess does not recognize her stepmother, spares the old woman and gives her alms. Only the guard dog barks angrily at the old woman. The queen gives her stepdaughter a poisoned apple. The princess bites him and dies.

When the heroes returned in the evening, they saw the body of the princess. A dog swallowing a poisoned apple lies nearby. The heroes realize that the princess was poisoned. Later they will put it in a crystal coffin, which they hang in a mountain cave. The happy queen hears from the mirror the long-awaited answer that she is more beautiful than anyone in the world.

Elisha is looking for the princess all over the world, but nowhere is his bride. Then he turns for help to those who see everything - the sun, the month and the wind. The sun and the month do not know anything about the missing princess. Only the wind gave Elisha a sad answer:

There, behind the small river
There is a high mountain
There is a deep hole in it;
In that hole, in the sad darkness
Crystal coffin sways
On chains between pillars.
See no trace
Around that empty place
In that coffin is your bride.

The saddened Elisha goes to look at her bride and kisses her, which contributes to her awakening. Happy lovers return home to play a wedding. At this time, the queen asks the mirror who is the most beautiful in the world, and again hears that the princess is more beautiful than her. In a fit of rage, the queen smashes the mirror to smithereens, and in a personal meeting with the princess dies of longing. The film ends with the wedding of the princess and prince Elisha, which, apparently, is attended by the named brothers of the princess, seven heroes.

• In the original, the poisoned apple is brought to the princess by a poor blueberry (nun) by order of the queen. In the film, the queen herself does it, disguised as a nun.
• At the end of the film, the princess wakes up from the kiss of Elisha, while in the original he breaks her coffin.

• Script by Ivan Ivanov-Vano , Yuri Oles
• Music by Yuri Nikolsky
• Stage Director: Ivan Ivanov-Vano
• Second Director: Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya
• Chief Artist: Lev Milchin
• Second artist: Victor Nikitin
• Operator: Nikolay Voinov
• Sound engineer: Nikolay Prilutsky
• Assistant artists: Lydia Model , A. Durakov
• Artists: Galina Nevzorova , Dmitry Anpilov , Irina Svetlitsa , Irina Troyanova
• Technical assistants: N. Orlova, V. Sveshnikova, Fedor Goldstein
• Montage: Nina Mayorova
• Animation artists:
  • Vladimir Arbekov
  • Nadezhda Privalova
  • Boris Butakov
  • Lidia Reztsova
  • Faina Epifanova
  • Joseph Staryuk
  • Grigory Kozlov
  • Tatyana Fedorova
  • Renata Mirenkova
  • Nikolai Fedorov
  • Lev Popov
  • Fedor Khitruk
  • Konstantin Chikin
  • Konstantin Malyshev

• Vera Popova - text from the author
• Maria Babanova - Queen / Mirror
• Galina Novozhilova - Princess
• Zinaida Bokareva - Chernavka
• Mikhail Nazvanov - episode
• Nikolay Litvinov - 5th hero / 7th hero
• Valentina Sperantova - month

In his next films - “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights” (1951) according to Pushkin, “The Snow Maiden” (1952), a full-length hand-drawn picture based on the play by Ostrovsky, using the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, “Twelve Months” (1956) after Marshaku - directed by Ivanov-Vano, continues to search for the embodiment of his ideas in a combination of themes, images, language, the style of great literature with the visual and musical drama that underlies fabulous cartoon fiction. It is important to note that the harmonious addition of three streams - traditional national-graphic motifs, classical music and literature - is, as it were, multiplied by the artist’s contemporary worldview, by citizenship and humanism, which are the essence of his creative position.

- Asenin S.V. ^[1]

For several decades, Ivanov-Vano has been tirelessly developing a magnificent, sparkling and inexhaustible layer of a Russian fairy tale. Folk tales and literary tales, close in spirit to the folk ... In the "Tale of Tsar Durandai" we find a sort of Russian song of Ivanov-Vano. A theme that one way or another does not pass most of his films. It will sound in a short “Winter's Tale” - a poetic fantasy woven from snow and the naive magic of the Christmas forest, set to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky; sparkles with sparkles in the "Humpbacked Horse", triumphantly bypassing the whole world; in one way or another it will be reflected in The Goose-Swans, in The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights, in The Snow Maiden and in The Twelve Months ...

- Abramova N. ^[2]

In the 1980s, the cartoon was released on videotapes in the collection "Video program of the USSR State Cinema". In the early 1990s, the cartoon was released by the Krupny Plan film association, together with the cartoon The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (1950), on videotapes. In the mid-1990s, he was released on VHS Studio PRO Video in the collection of cartoon fairy tales by A. Pushkin, along with the cartoon " Twelve Months " (1956), and in the cartoon collection of the Soyuzmultfilm movie studio by Soyuz studio.

• "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights" on " Animator.ru "
• The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights (English) on the Internet Movie Database
• "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema"
• “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights” Images from the film
• 10 legendary cartoons by Ivan Ivanov-Vano m.vm.ru