it changed the perception of animation as an art form. It also became the first colorized Soviet animated film and one of the first to get a musical score and a voiceover by Daniil Kharms. Mikhail and his wife Vera Tsekhanovskaya led an animation studio at Lenfilm where a number of distinctive hand-drawn and stop motion films were created throughout the 1930s, including the much-praised (1938) by . The team actively applied color using the original dye-transfer process invented by Lenfilm specialists, similar to Technicolor. In 1933, the couple collaborated with Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Vvedensky on the first traditionally animated Soviet feature — The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda, a satirical opera loosely based on the fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin and stylized as ROSTA posters. Despite many problems, including the infamous bullying of Shostakovich in press, the film was nearly finished and had been stored at Lenfilm until 1941 when almost all of it was destroyed in fire caused by the bombings of Leningrad. Tsekhanovsky is also credited with invention of graphical sound along with Arseny Avraamov and . They were challenged by a group led by who made a number of animated shorts based on their own idea of "drawing paper sound". In 1935, Aleksandr Ptushko directed The New Gulliver, one of the world's first full-length animated movies that combined detailed stop motion with a live actor (a 15-year-old boy). The film featured from 1,500 to 3,000 different puppets with detachable heads and various facial expressions, as well as camera and technical tricks. The international success of the movie allowed Ptushko to open his own "division of 3D animation" at Mosfilm which also worked as a school for beginning animators. In four years, they created a dozen of stop motion shorts; most of them, such as (1936), were based around Russian folklore, traditional art (with the involvement of artists from Palekh) and could be watched in full color thanks to the newly invented three-color film process by . In 1939, Ptushko directed another feature — The Golden Key based on the popular Soviet fairy tale; it also combined stop motion with live action, but to a lesser extent. Simultaneously, Alexandre Alexeieff who fled for France during the Russian Civil War developed a pinscreen animation technology that allowed for a wide spectre of special effects achieved through the use of hundreds of