Studio: A. Khanzhonkov and Co.
Short Synopsis
The subtitle tells the story: "the war of the longhorns with the stag beetles". In a mock-medieval court of insects, the beautiful Lukanida, queen of the stag beetles, is loved by a knight of the rival longhorn beetles, and their romance sets off a war between the two tribes, with castles, duels, a siege and a dramatic death, all played by real beetles. Starevich, then the curator of a natural-history museum in Kaunas, had tried to film live stag beetles fighting and found that they stopped moving under the hot lights; so he killed and dried them, replaced their legs with wire, and moved them a fraction at a time between exposures. The result is a parody of the costume melodramas of the day, acted by insects.
Why It Matters
- The beetles are genuinely acted: they gesture, duel, swoon and die with a comic solemnity that makes the parody work, and the sets, with their tiny towers and drawbridges, are built to their scale. Reviewers at the time could not work out how it had been done, and some assumed the insects had been trained.
- It was the first puppet-animated film made in Russia and one of the first anywhere, the beginning of Starevich's career as the greatest puppet animator of the silent era, which continued in France with The Tale of the Fox (1937). The Khanzhonkov company released it in April 1912 and it was shown across Europe and in the United States, where its trick was still a mystery.
Notes and Trivia
- Gosfilmofond restored the film in 2012 with a new narration and Tchaikovsky's Sentimental Waltz as accompaniment.
- Starevich's next films, The Cameraman's Revenge and The Insects' Christmas, used the same cast of insects.
- Lucanus Cervus, Starevich's lost 1910 beetle film, is the direct ancestor.
- See also: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).