Soviet animation

The History of Russian animation is the film art produced by Russian animation makers. As most of Russia's production of animation for 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 Russian animator was Aleksander Shiryayev, a principal dancer and choreographer at the Imperial Russian Ballet who made a number of pioneering stop motion and traditionally animated films between 1906 and 1909. He built an improvised studio at his apartment where he carefully recreated various ballets — first by making thousands of sketches and then by staging them using hand-made puppets; he shot them using the 17.5 mm Biokam camera, frame by frame. Shiryaev didn't hold much interest in animation as an art form, but rather saw it as an instrument in studying human plastics, hoping to apply his films for educational purposes. He only showed them to a few people, and they were mostly forgotten during the Soviet period, although Fyodor Lopukhov mentioned Shiryayev's animation experiments in his memoirs. In 1995 they were re-discovered by a ballet historian Viktor Bocharov who got hold of Shiryayev's archives that had been kept safe by a ballet photographer Daniil Savelyev, a close friend of Shiryayev's family. In 2003 Bocharov released a documentary Belated Premiere which included fregments of various films by Aleksander Shiryayev. Aardman Animations was involved in restoration and digitizing process.

The second person to independently discover animation was Ladislas Starevich known in Russia by the name of Vladyslav Starevich. Being a trained biologist, he started to make animation with embalmed insects for educational purposes, but soon realized the possibilities of this 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 him a decoration from Nicholas II of Russia. He produced a number of other popular animated films with insects at the Aleksandr Khanzhonkov's studio where he also worked as a cinematographer and a director of life-action films, sometimes combining life action with stop motion animation, as in The Night Before Christmas and A Terrible Vengeance (both from 1913). Starevich left Russia after the October Revolution, and for many years the animation industry was paralyzed.

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