to do this, but Willis O'Brien had made The Lost World in 1925 and King Kong in 1933. The New Gulliver was, however, far more complex, as it featured 3,000 different puppets.) The story, a Communist re-telling of Gulliver's Travels, is about a young boy who dreams of himself as a version of Gulliver who has landed in Lilliput suffering under capitalist inequality and exploitation. The New Gulliver was released in 1935 to widespread acclaim and earned Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan. After the success of The New Gulliver, Ptushko was allowed by Mosfilm to set up his own department, which became known as "the Ptushko Collective," for the making of stop-motion animated films. This group of filmmakers would produce another fourteen animated shorts from 1936 to 1938. The direction of these shorts was rarely handled by Ptushko, though he would always act as the artistic supervisor for the group. These shorts were also frequently based on folktales and fairy-tales, a genre which was to become the source of Ptushko's greatest success. He personally directed two of them: an adaptation of The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish fairy tale (1937) and Merry Musicians (1938). Both films were made in full color utilizing the newly invented three-color method by the Russian cinematographer Pavel Mershin. In 1938, Ptushko began work on The Golden Key, another feature-length film combining stop-motion animation with live action. An adaptation of The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino fairy tale by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which, at the same time, was a retelling of the Pinocchio story, it predated the Disney version by two years. The film was also highly successful in the Soviet Union, and did achieve limited released outside the country. Despite its success, The Golden Key was to be Ptushko's last foray into animation. During World War II, most of Moscow's film community, including Aleksandr Ptushko, were evacuated to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. He continued working in special effects, but would not direct another film until the end of the war. Mythological Epic Era At the end of World War II, Ptushko returned to Moscow and created his first feature-length folktale adaptation, The Stone Flower using the three-color Agfa film stock which had been seized in Germany. It was a more progressive and less complex method of shooting a color film than the one by Pavel Mershin,