The Night Before Christmas

About The Night Before Christmas (1913)

The Night Before Christmas (Noch pered Rozhdestvom) is a 1913 Russian silent fantasy by Ladislas Starevich, the animation pioneer behind The Insects' Christmas, adapted from Nikolai Gogol's tale of a Ukrainian village on Christmas Eve. A devil, played by Ivan Mozzhukhin, steals the moon and courts the witch Solokha, whose visitors end up hiding in sacks, while the blacksmith Vakula rides the devil all the way to St Petersburg to fetch the tsaritsa's slippers for the proud Oksana. It has the original Russian intertitles. It airs on Starlite TV's Silent Pictures channel (CH 12).