History of Russian animation

The History of Russian animation is the film art produced by Russian animation makers. As most of Russia's production of animation for film|cinema and television were created during Soviet times, it may also be referred to some extent as the History of Soviet animation. It remains a nearly unexplored field in film theory and history outside Russia.

The first animator in Russia was Aleksander Shiryayev, who was a principal dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet, as well as a teacher and choreographer. He made a number of pioneering puppet-animated ballet films between 1906 and 1909. He only showed them to a few people, and they were forgotten until their re-discovery in 1995.

The second person in Russia to independently discover animation was Ladislas Starevich, who was of Polish descent and is therefore also known by the name of Wladyslaw Starewicz. Being a trained biologist, he started to make animation with embalmed insects for educational purposes, but soon realized the possibilities of his medium to become one of the undisputed masters of stop motion later in his life. His first few films, made in 1910, were dark comedies on the family lives of cockroaches, and were so revolutionary that they earned Starevich a decoration from the Tsar. Yet, these pioneers did not adapt to the new realities of filmmaking after the Russian Revolution and the real origins of Soviet animation can be said to belong to the much younger generation of artists, trained in the fine arts but drawn to mass media for its ability to be an agent of social change.

In 1934, Walt Disney sent a film reel with some shorts of Mickey Mouse to the Moscow Film Festival. In 1935, the Soyuzdetmultfilm-Studio was created from the small and relatively independent trickfilm units of Mosfilm, Sovkino and Mezhrabpromfilm in order to focus on the creation of Disney-style animation, exclusively using cel technique.

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