- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- Ladislas Stareveitch
- Although his name nowadays means very little except to animation buffs (and even they have to be pretty well informed), Wladyslaw Starewicz ranks alongside Walt Disney, as one of the great animation pioneers, and his career started nearly a decade before Disney's. He became an animator by accident - fascinated by insects, he bought a camera and attempted to film them, but they kept dying under the hot lights. Stop-motion animation provided an instant (if slow) solution, and Starewicz discovered that he had a natural talent for it. He subsequently made dozens of short films, mostly featuring his trademark stop-motion puppets, but also live action films (some blending live action and animation), moving to France after the Russian Revolution to continue his career. His longest and most ambitious film was the feature-length 'Tale of the Fox', which took ten years to plan and eighteen months to shoot. Starewicz' films were virtually one-man shows (writer/director/cameraman/designer/animator), though other important contributions (in front of and behind the camera) were made by his daughters.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>
- Wladyslaw Starewicz, a grand master of animation, was one of the directors of Lovno Museum of Natural History and graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. He began making puppet films about 1911 (see 'Mest finematograficheskogo operatou'), emigrated to France in 1920 and continued to develop there his technique for plastic animation with the help of his two daughters, Irene Starewicz and Nina Star, whose birth-name was Jeannie Starewicz. He, with the help of his daughters, in front of and behind the camera, employed articulated puppets constructed with an extraordinary precision, with features that could be altered at will (with stop-motion)to produce any desired expression, and dressed in costumes designed with great attention to detail. He filmed laboriously, frame by frame, and produced some of the most fantastic storybook characters and tales ever seen on the screen.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Les Adams <longhorn1939@suddenlink.net>
- SpouseAnna Zimmerman(November 25, 1906 - 1956) (her death, 2 children)
- Behind-the-scenes photographs of him at work on his films show that, unlike most conventional stop-motion filmmakers, his puppets were actually quite large. The figures of the Lion King and Lioness Queen are as tall as Starewicz himself.
- Childhood passion was entomology. Began his film career in Russia around 1909, making little shorts on insects in and around Moscow. Later educated as an entomologist, he passionately wanted to film two stag beetles fighting, but they didn't like his camera lights and would not fight. However, the film idea led directly to his animation of insects by stop-motion photography; which in turn gave him the idea for what many believe to be his masterpiece--The Cameraman's Revenge (1912).
- Father of Irene Starewicz.
- [on his attempt to film two stag beetles fighting] I waited days and days to shoot a battle. But they would not fight with the lights shining on them.
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