Wladyslaw starewicz biography of donald
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Early Stop-Motion Animation, Starring Dead Bugs, Is Meticulous, Hilarious
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The first stop-motion animated films were more than a mere curiosity. Wladislaw Starewicz’s animated insect-puppets set the bar so high for technical mastery and charm that they continue to capture the imagination of artists today.
Starewicz, a Polish photographer and entomologist, was born in Moscow to Polish parents in 1882, raised in Lithuania, and moved back to Moscow in 1911 to work for one of Russia’s first great film producers, Alexander Khanzhonkov. There he used wire and wax to make real beetles, dragonflies, and grasshoppers the actors in his comedies and dramas.
In The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), one of his early masterpieces, the bugs enact a comic melodrama in meticulously detailed miniature sets. We meet a beetle coupl
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The Town Rat and the Country Rat
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Charming puppet animation from Wladyslaw Starewicz
You don't have to be a fan of obscure animated shorts to enjoy this film, which tells the familiar tale of the Town Rat and the Country Rat (or mouse, or hamster, or what-have-you) with puppets. This rulle was made in France in the '20s, and the print I've seen hasn't been translated into English, but it won't matter if your French is rusty, for the title kort are brief and simple. Director Wladyslaw Starewicz was born in Poland, worked in Russia and in Europe over a period of many years, and deserves to be better known, for his films are a real treat.
The Town Rat and the Country Rat kicks off with hectic shots of the urban rat dealing with city traffic, careening through intersections in front of what looks like a rear-projection screen, then leaving Paris for the country, where he promptly smashes his car into a haystack on his cousin's farm. They retu
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The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladislas Starevich’s Animation of Goethe’s Great German Folktale (1937)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — the very name bespeaks literary mastery of the widest range. Not only did this best-known of all eighteenth- and — nineteenth-century German writers reach into poetry, the novel, the memoir, autobiography, criticism, science, philosophy, and even politics, but he did a bit of interpretation of classic folktales as well. The Faust and Sorrows of Young Werther author wrote a particularly lasting rendition of the adventures of Reynard the Fox, a trickster from medieval European myth. Had Goethe himself lived into the 20th century to experience the golden age of puppet animation, I feel certain his artistic mandate would have compelled him to film a version of The Tale of the Fox. Alas, the literary legend passed away in 1832, leaving the job, nearly a century later, to Russian a