Ladislas Starevich (, ; August 8, 1882 – February 26, 1965) was a Polish-Russian stop-motion animator notable as the author of the first puppet-animated film The Beautiful Leukanida (1912). He also used dead insects and other animals as protagonists of his films. Following the Russian Revolution, Starevich settled in France. Early career Władysław Starewicz was born in Moscow to ethnic Polish parents from present-day Lithuania. His father, Aleksander Starewicz, was from Surviliškis near Kėdainiai and his mother, Antonina Legęcka, from Kaunas. Both belonged to lesser nobility and were in hiding after the failed January Uprising against the Tsarist Russian domination. Due to his mother's death, he was raised by his grandmother in Kaunas, then the capital of Kaunas Governorate within the Russian Empire. He attended Gymnasium in Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia), where he worked painting postcards and illustrations for local magazines. Starewicz pursued an artistic career despite the protest of his family, and enrolled in a painting school. Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was named Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kaunas, Lithuania. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures stopped moving or died due to the heat whenever the stage lighting was turned on. Inspired by a viewing of Les allumettes animées [Animated Matches] (1908) by Arthur Melbourne Cooper, Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: by replacing the beetles' legs with wire, attached with sealing wax to their thorax, he is able to create articulated insect puppets. The result was the short film Lucanus Cervus (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film and the natal hour of Russian animation. In 1911, Starewicz moved to Moscow and began work with the film company of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. There he made two dozen films, most of them puppet animations using dead animals. Of these, The Beautiful Leukanida (premiere – 1912), first puppet film with a plot inspired in the story of Agamemnon and Menelaus, earned international acclaim (one British reviewer thought the stars were live trained insects), while The Grasshopper and the Ant (1913) got Starewicz decorated by the czar. But the best-known film of this period was The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects. Some