The Wild Swans

The Wild Swans is a 1962 soviet animated film based on the 1838 Hans Christian Andersen tale with the same name. I loved this story during my childhood and still do. Surely you remember it... but if you don't you can read it here. It begins,

Far, far away where the swallows fly when we have winter, there lived a King who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elisa. The eleven brothers, Princes all, each went to school with a star at his breast and a sword at his side. They wrote with pencils of diamond upon golden slates, and could say their lesson by heart just as easily as they could read it from the book. You could tell at a glance how princely they were. Their sister, Elisa, sat on a little footstool of flawless glass. She had a picture book that had cost half a kingdom. Oh, the children had a very fine time, but it did not last forever.

Their father, who was King over the whole country, married a wicked Queen, who did not treat his poor children at all well.

This adaptation is not exactly like the story as I remember it, but close enough.

Senses of Cinema has a detailed consideration and says,

The Wild Swans has received relatively scant scholarly attention. However, it deserves closer scrutiny because of its marriage of daring, experimental stylization of the flat drawn image with Disney-influenced naturalism and melodrama. The resulting aesthetic tensions, while not always creatively successful, make for a remarkable historical document of a pivotal transitional moment in Soviet animation.