and the film apparently won a "special prize for the use of color" at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. With its plotline featuring a focus on character over effects and the use of mythology as a primary source, The Stone Flower set the tone for the next twelve years of Ptushko's career. He followed The Stone Flower with Sadko (the film, which was heavily recut and retitled The Magic Voyage of Sinbad for American release, is an adaptation of a Russian bylina [epic tale] with no connection to Sinbad), Ilya Muromets (retitled The Sword and the Dragon for American release), and Sampo (an adaptation of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala retitled The Day the Earth Froze for American release). Each film in the sequence was a theatrical retelling of epic mythology, and each was extremely visually ambitious. Sadko won the "Silver Lion" award at the Venice Film Festival in 1953. Ilya Muromets was another of Ptushko's famous 'firsts' in Soviet cinema, being the first Soviet film to be made using widescreen photography and stereo sound. Ilya Muromets is also widely claimed to hold the record for most people and horses ever to be used in a film (the IMDB lists the tagline for the film as: "A cast of 106,000! 11,000 Horses!"). Late career After Sampo, Ptushko briefly abandoned epic fantasy for more realistic scripts. His first work in this vein was Scarlet Sails, a romantic adventure story set in the late 19th century. It retained much of the visual power of Ptushko's previous films, but greatly reduced the fantastical elements and the amount of special effects whilst focusing on character interaction and development to an extent not seen since The Stone Flower. Following Scarlet Sails, Ptushko made A Tale of Time Lost, a story about children whose youth is stolen by elderly mages, reintroducing a fantastical element. Uniquely for Ptushko, the film featured a modern-day, real world Moscow setting. In 1966 Ptushko returned to the genre of epic fantasy, creating The Tale of Tsar Saltan. In 1968 he began work on the largest film project of his career Ruslan and Ludmila, which was also to prove his last. Running for 149 minutes (split into two feature-length segments), Ruslan and Ludmila was a film adaptation of Aleksandr Pushkin's epic poem of the same name, and was filled with the sumptuous visuals and technical wizardry for which Ptushko