Studio: A. Khanzhonkov and Co.
Short Synopsis
A small Father Frost figure, the kind that hangs as an ornament on a Russian Christmas tree, comes to life and climbs down into the world outside. He sets off on foot across a snowy plain toward the forest, carrying a little fir tree on his shoulder. In the woods he finds the insects and small creatures who live there, half asleep in the winter cold, and brings them a Christmas of their own. A frog and a crowd of beetles and other insects gather around him on the frozen pond; the tree is set up and decorated, and the creatures skate on the ice, dance and celebrate. The surviving copies tell the story almost entirely through action, with very little explanation, and the exact order of some festivities differs slightly between circulating versions.
Why It Matters
- The puppets are real insect bodies, preserved and fitted with wire joints, moved frame by frame through miniature snowscapes with real depth and lighting. Seeing a frog on skates beside a bearded Father Frost on a frozen pond is uncanny and charming in equal measure, and the tinted surviving prints, blue for night and amber for interiors, make the sets look like illustrated postcards come alive.
- Starevich was the first major puppet animator, and this is one of the earliest of his insect films to survive. His technique of armatured, articulated figures underpins the whole later tradition of stop-motion, from Willis O'Brien's dinosaurs to the Czech and Soviet puppet studios.
Notes and Trivia
- Starevich began animating insects because he could not film live beetles fighting under hot studio lights; he turned to dead specimens and wire, and found he could make them act.
- He made the film in Moscow for Aleksandr Khanzhonkov's studio, Russia's leading producer before the Revolution. After 1917 he emigrated and continued working in France until the 1960s.
- See also: The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), Starevich's insect melodrama of adultery.