This is the first ever cartoon produced in the Russian Empire (VIDEO)
Vladislav Starevich’s ‘The Beautiful Leukanida’ was a 10-minute animated short, released in 1912.
The first ever cartoon produced in the Russian Empire for years had people coming out in droves to witness the miracle!
Vladislav Starevich’s ‘The Beautiful Leukanida’ was a 10-minute animated short, released in 1912. It was a tale of love and war, starring actual beetles, and caused a massive stir among the public. People seriously believed that Starevich trained the bugs to act, battling each other, confessing their love, and sitting peacefully on a throne.
In reality, the bugs were, of course, quite dead: Starevich made them come alive by attaching barely visible pieces of wire to their limbs with wax: “I used stop motion to film every set of movements, split into phases. I had to recalibrate the lighting for every shot”, he recalled of one of the first cartoons ever created in the world.
Funny, but the behavior of the main character - Leukanida - so outraged the Bolsheviks when they took power in 1917, that the cartoon was renamed ‘The Courtesan on the Throne’.
Read more: How da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' ended up in the USSR
