Vyacheslav Levandovsky

Vyacheslav Levandovsky (February 24, 1897 – April 18, 1962), considered to be the founder of Ukrainian animation,

Early life Levandovsky was born on February 24, 1897, in Kyiv. An active, thin child with a shy demeanor, his artistic ability impressed others.

Career Drawn to the arts and to theater, in 1920 he began work in theaters painting scenery and illustrating books. Interested in ballet, he became associated with Serge Lifer and in 1923 studied ballet at the Kyiv Music and Drama Institute. He graduated from Kyiv Academy of Arts. However, the film has now been lost. While the original film was lost, Oleksandr Shimon from Kharkiv saw the original work and described it: "We got to see several cartoon characters, small paper figures of animals, consisting of hinged parts, they still amaze with their expressiveness and filigree of technical execution, perfectly reproduce the illusion of movement.".

Levandovsky built his own camera with wooden parts and optics. He came up with an "éclair" method that used the filmed actor performance projected onto a screen still frame by still frame as a model for drawing animated characters in motion.

The All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU), parent entity of Levandovsky's animation studio, closed in the early 1930s with many of its leaders imprisoned or executed to suppress a Ukrainian national revival in the 1930s. After its closure, the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration was recreated into the All-Ukrainian film industry trust, "Ukrainfilm". This move effectively ended the studio's independence, making it a branch of the Soviet Union's Soyuzkino.

During this time Levandovsky was working on one of the first Ukrainian animation films with sound, Tuk-Tuk i yego priyatel Zhuk(translated either Tuk-Tuk and his friend Zhuk or Knok-Knok and his friend Beatle) in 1932 (The United States' Walt Disney Company had released its first animation with synchronized sound, Steamboat Willie, four years earlier in 1928). Levandovsky continued working in Kyiv until 1936 and Moscow after 1933.

Continuing work Levandovsky began, in 1934 in Odesa, two of Levandovsky's young students, Semyon Guetsky (1902–1974) and Eugene Gorbach (1901-?), 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. Started in 1928 by Levandovsky and finished by Guetsky and Gorbach in 1935, the 1936 Zhuk v zooparke (the Beatle in the Zoo)