Oleg Kuvaev

Oleg Igorevich Kuvaev (Russian: Олег Игоревич Куваев; born 6 February 1967) is a Russian artist, designer and animator.

It was Masyanya who brought fame to Oleg Kuvaev. Masyanya, an amusing and touching heroine of the witty flash-animated series that first appeared in the Russian internet on 20 October 2001, has become nearly a cult figure. Oleg Kuvaev started everything on his own: he made up the characters and the stories, drew the flash-animated cartoons, recorded the sound, and uploaded the series (each of them about 3–4 minutes long) in the Internet.

Oleg Igorevich Kuvaev was born on 6 February 1967 in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad). He studied first at a school specializing in the English language, then at school majoring in physics and mathematics. Afterwards there were a number of higher institutions (including the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrumentation,Academy of Arts) and service in the Soviet Army. Then, he changed a lot of professions and places, mostly active as a painter and sculptor for more than 10 years, till the times of "Big Worldwide Web" come.

From 1987 he was mainly into painting and sculpture, and from 1997 he turned to computer graphics. Kuvaev worked as a designer in several studios, in "computer gaming" industry as 3D animator and modeler, as web-designer, even java-programmer, in his free time experimenting with various computer technologies including freshly appearing vector animation (macromedia flash).

In 2001 he founded “Mult.ru” studio to promote Masyanya. At this point it was just ten short rough-made cartoons about hooligan girl from Saint Petersburg. But success was unexpectedly explosive. This resulted in epidemic masyanization of the whole country, which is perhaps the major achievement of Kuvaev. Full of fresh indigenous humor (sometimes caustic and absurd but still kind at bottom) the series about Masyanya appealed to the young generation whose life, interests and problems they actually focused on, at the same time embodying an alternative to commercial mass-culture.

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