Starevich

Starevich is a surname most closely associated with Władysław Starewicz, also known as Ladislas Starevich, a pioneering filmmaker and stop-motion animator. Born in 1882 in the Russian Empire and later working across Europe, he became one of the early innovators in independent animation. The name appears in various transliterations, including Władysław Starewicz and Ladislas/Starevich, reflecting Polish, Russian, and French linguistic contexts.

Starevich is best known for his experiments with stop-motion techniques, particularly using articulated puppets and insects to tell stories. His 1912 silent film The Cameraman's Revenge is widely cited as a landmark in animation history, featuring anthropomorphized insect characters created through frame-by-frame manipulation. The film helped establish stop-motion as a serious artistic and technical pursuit rather than a novelty, influencing generations of animators who followed.

Throughout his career, Starevich worked in Russia and later in Western Europe, including France, after the political upheures of the early 20th century. His body of work in the 1910s and 1920s demonstrated early possibilities for narrative animation and the expressive potential of non-human subjects. Today, Starevich is remembered for introducing and refining techniques that would become fundamental to modern stop-motion cinema, and his name remains the principal reference for the constituency of this field.