along with a full analog of a multiplane camera. Eclair (rotoscoping) also rose to popularity. According to the 1951 report by Ivan Ivanov-Vano, it was a temporary measure that served as a teaching tool for beginning animators. Many leading actors were involved, such as Mikhail Astangov who appeared as the beast in The Scarlet Flower (1952). Some directors made extensive use of this method, while others mixed it with traditional animation as in The Snow Queen (1957) by Lev Atamanov, arguably the most famous work of that time. Many focused on animal art with little to no use of rotoscoping. All this allowed for a yearly release of prominent feature films with high production values such as The Night Before Christmas (1951), The Snow Maiden (1952), The Enchanted Boy and The Frog Princess (1954), The Twelve Months (1956) and The Adventures of Buratino (1959). The Khrushchev Thaw First changes happened in 1953 when a puppet division was reopened at Soyuzmultfilm. In 1954, Yevgeniy Migunov along with an engineer Semyon Etlis produced the first Soviet stop motion film since Aleksandr Ptushko: about the adventures of the Russian clown Karandash and his dog. According to Migunov, they had to reinvent the whole production process. They organized a technical base, constructed and patented a device for shooting in statics, with a horizontally moving camera and attachable dolls. Also for the first time they used ball-jointed dolls and latex to make puppet faces. They were followed by Vladimir Degtyaryov who produced many films such as Beloved Beauty (1958) and (1962), Roman Kachanov and who directed the award-winning (1959) that combined stop motion, traditional and cutout animation, and Nikolay Serebryakov whose style was marked by extensive aesthetic search for "combination of realism and the baroque". Sergey Obraztsov and his team also produced a number of movies using hand puppets. In 1957, Migunov directed based on the sketches by a stand-up comedian Arkady Raikin who also appeared in the short. What made it special was a radical style of magazine caricatures, since Raikin's satire didn't fit the "realistic" art direction. It was not long until other animators started abandoning it. In 1958, Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya released an adaptation of Arkady Gaidar's A Tale of Malchish-Kibalchish inspired by ROSTA posters, while Boris Stepantsev and Evgeny Raykovsky directed a postmodern that leant towards Tex Avery. In 1960–1962, a whole line of "formalistic" features hit the screens, such as It