History of Ukrainian animation

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Ukraine's flag

The history of Ukrainian animation, which began in the late 1920s, is part of Ukrainian cinematography and has involved several techniques, like frame-by-frame filming, time lapse, or three-dimensional pictures.

The Soviet age[]

The history of Ukrainian animation began in 1927, when Vyacheslav Lewandowski of the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration in Odessa created the puppet cartoon "The Tale of the Straw Bull",^[1] based on the fairy tale of the same name by Oleksandr Oles. However, the film has now been lost, and the only parts that we know about it were a few shots described by Oleksandr Shimon, a person who watched the film:

We saw several cartoon characters, small paper figures of animals, consisting of hinged parts. They still amaze us with their expressiveness and filigree, and how they perfectly reproduce the illusion of movement.

— Oleksandr Shimon

The events that followed during World War II and the Holodomor virtually destroyed this art form. In 1934, also in Odessa, young animators created the first Ukrainian graphic animated film, Murzilka in Africa, about a fairy tale character named Murzilka who goes to Africa to save a girl named Kane from oppression and cruelty. A year later, Tuk-Tuk and his friend Zhuk was released, which was filmed by two of Lewandowski's students: Semyon Guetsky and Eugene Gorbach. The adventures of a boy named Tuk-Tuk and his dog Zhuk were the first attempt to create a serial character. However, oppression and the ongoing war diminished the animation base in the country. Therefore, the development of Ukrainian animation was paused and later resumed in the 1950s, when animator Ipolyt Lazarchuk began making animations again. He was in part responsible for the renaissance of Ukrainian animation. The film The Adventures of Pepper was released in 1961, made by a team which apparently didn't have experience animating prior to the making of The Adventures of Pepper. The cartoon tells the story of Pepper, a magazine employee who is approached by animals suffering from poachers who also pollute the forest and river. In 1967, the film studio Kievnauchfilm received a letter from a now-unknown resident of Zaporizhzhia, pitching the studio to make a film called How the Cossacks cooked kulish, and the success of the film, now reimagined as a cartoon, once released kickstarted the Cossacks animation franchise in Ukraine.

Volodymyr Dakhno drew a long stick for me and said that it was the cossack Grai, the big circle was the strongman Tur, the small one was the agile Oko. As an animator, I made characters out of his ideas. He created faces for them, grew bodies. He made them what everyone knows them today. By the way, not everyone knows that at first there was an idea to make a feature film about the Cossacks, but nothing came of this idea. As a result, they decided to make a cartoon. Nobody thought that something serious could come out of it.

— Eduard Kirich, an artist and designer of the Cossacks

Other cartoons in the series included How the Cossacks played football, How the Cossacks liberated the brides, How the Cossacks bought salt, How the Cossacks became Olympians, How the Cossacks helped the musketeers, and How the Cossacks played hockey. There were 9 cartoons in total.

In 1976, the first cartoon series Adventures of Captain Wrongel became one of the most well-known cartoons of the Soviet Union, based around a sea captain who competes in a regatta which is linked to a theft from a famed museum. The cartoon Kapitoshka about friendly relations was released in 1980. In 1981, the cartoon Alice in the Country was released.

In 1984, the Kievnauchfilm studio shot the cartoon How Petryk Pyatochkin Called Elephants, written by the character-children's writer Natalia Guzeeva.

In the early 1990s, due to the collapse of the USSR, the archives of Kievnauchfilm were completely destroyed. Officials of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture apparently destroyed evidence of the old Soviet films. Background screensavers and sketches for already shot films and future scripts are all that is left of the Soviet legacy of Ukrainian animation.

References[]