This beetle is going into the city to see his lover.
She’s a dancer.
But this 1912 film is not just a staggeringly weird tale of insect infidelity.
It’s the true kickoff to a stop motion tradition that has given us a ton of wildly different
movies.
But this invention didn’t come from Hollywood.
It was made by an obsessive insect collector in Lithuania who wanted to see insects dance.
Stop motion is this combination of simplicity and very, very tedious work.
“Ah f..”
An animator arranges objects in poses and takes a picture.
You move the object slightly and take another picture.
Played successively, it looks like motion.”
You can tweak the process in a lot of ways - adding more frames - and more precise movements,
will make for a smoother animation.
The potential of this illusion of movement was obvious really quickly, like in 1908’s
The Sculptor’s Nightmare, where busts briefly moved or A Dream of Toyland, likely from the
same year, which made toys come alive.
But it took a European collector to elevate it to an artform that changed the movies.
Wladyslaw Starewicz was born in Moscow and bounced around the pre-revolution Russian
Empire, ending up in Kaunas - a city in modern day Lithuania, then called Kovno.
Some sources say Starewicz was a Natural History museum director there (others say he just
had a huge insect collection).
Either way, he had a problem.
As he revealed later, he was commissioned to make educational films “to show the life
of the stag beetles.”
He “waited days and days to shoot a battle between two beetles, but they would not fight
with the lights shining on them.”
So he started experimenting with making stationary insects look like they were moving.
He started with that stag beetle, which he called by its scientific name: Lucanus Cervus.
The goal was to show its fighting behavior, but his next insect movie leapt to fiction
to tell the tale of Helen of Troy.
In 1912, The Cameraman’s Revenge — that insect infidelity movie — became his most
influential early work.
See how this artist is actually painting another beetle?
Or how this grasshopper, filming Mr. Beetle’s affair with a dragonfly, look how his tripod
has individual legs.
These miniscule touches were everywhere.
He said he did it by installing wheels and strings in each insect, and occasionally replacing
their legs with plastic or metal ones.
He used black threads to help move them.
And it worked.
After the Russian Revolution, Starewicz fled to Paris.
He continued making films.
By the time he made Frogland, he’d changed his name from Wladislaw to Ladislas to make
it easier to pronounce in French.
He continued to make incredibly influential art — with stop motion — because “actors
always want to have their own way.”
He had a host of popular films and stop motion quickly influenced popular art and special
effects.
Starevich’s stop motion inspired the work that was done in King Kong.
Terry Gilliam — the director and animator behind the surreal Monty Python stop-motion
animations — said Starevich’s The Mascot was one of the best animated films of all
time.
And Starevich’s masterpiece, Le Roman de Renard clearly inspired Wes Anderson’s “The
Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
This combination of wild invention and obsessive detail created a new art form.
At the end of The Cameraman’s Revenge, the grasshopper screens the movie he filmed
through a keyhole, the one of Mr. Beetle cheating on his wife.
She hits him with an umbrella.
The movies changed forever.
The beetles spent the night in jail.
That’s it for this one in this series about big changes to movies that came from outside
Hollywood.
Stop motion’s a really global form, so I want to know some of your favorite examples
in the comments.
I also want to leave you with a testimony to Starevich’s work, which is that in some
of the early reviews, people were very very impressed with how well he had “trained”
his beetles to move around, and I honestly don’t know if they were joking.