Editing History of Russian animation (section)

== Beginnings ==
[[File:Cameraman's revenge.JPG|thumb|Scene from Ladislas Starevich's ''The Cameraman's Revenge'' (1911).]]
The first Russian animator was [[Alexander Shiryaev]], a principal ballet dancer and choreographer at the [[Mariinsky Theatre]] 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 film|17.5&nbsp;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.<ref>Kisselgoff, Anna. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E0DD1438F937A25752C0A9639C8B63 Critic's Notebook; Pioneering Russian Films Show Ballet Master's Wit]. ''New York Times''. January 14, 2005. Accessed on: June 23, 2009.</ref><ref name='lord'>[[Peter Lord|Lord, Peter]]. [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/animation-ballet The start of stop-frame]. ''The Guardian''. November 14, 2008. Accessed on: June 23, 2009.</ref><ref name='alovert'>[[Nina Alovert]]. ''[http://www.russian-bazaar.com/ru/content/6316.htm Belated Premier. Past Pages Come to Life]'' article from the Russian Bazaar magazine, January, 2005 (in Russian)</ref> They were mostly forgotten during the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] period, mentioned only in the memoirs of his students.<ref name='alovert' /> In 1995, they were re-discovered by a ballet historian Viktor Bocharov who got hold of Shiryayev's archives and released ''A Belated Premiere'' documentary in 2003 with fragments of various films. All of them were later restored and digitized with the help from the [[Pordenone Silent Film Festival]] and [[Aardman Animations]].<ref name='lord' /><ref>[https://thebioscope.net/2008/10/22/ Pordenone diary 2008 – day seven] at The Bioscope blog, October 22, 2008</ref>

The second person to independently discover animation was [[Ladislas Starevich|Vladislav 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 [[black comedy|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 live-action films, sometimes combining live action with stop motion animation, as in ''[[The Night Before Christmas (1913 film)|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.