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’.
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