Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The first (and possibly the weirdest) Soviet animation

A belly of a gluttonous bourgeois is cut open by a  centaur formed by a worker and a farmer. A Mystery Man (creepier than the one from Lynch’s Lost Highway) appears from time to time and advertises something. The film ends happily (?): Red Army soldiers appear and form a Christmas tree, that is decorated with all the enemies of the Soviet rule, as if they were toys…

Dziga Vertov, best known for his seminal film Man With a Movie Camera (1929), is responsible for this symbolic masterpiece of revolutionary art and the first animation film in the history of Soviet cinema – Soviet Toys (1924).