Victorious Destination

Soyuzmultfilm, 1939: a locomotive labeled VKP(b) runs toward the future and nothing is allowed to stop it. Directed by Dmitriy Babichenko, Leonid Amalrik, and Vladimir Polkovnikov; seven minutes of five-year-plan cartoon. Power stations rise, Stakhanov appears, saboteurs lay a rail that the train simply eats. The song is "Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become Merrier," Stalin's line from 1935, sung as if it were weather. Released the year the third plan would be interrupted by a war the film cannot imagine. Watch it as animation history and as a document of what the studio was for.