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Bedded Bugs and Stung Beetles: The Cameraman's Revenge (1912)
Perhaps the first work of puppet animation, featuring a cast composed of dead bugs.
This may sound like a hand-drawn animation of entomological adultery — an after-the-watershed Bug’s Life — but The Cameraman’s Revenge(1912) is actually a painstaking stop-motion film, featuring real insect corpses, carefully arranged by the nimble hands of Ladislas Starevich (1882–1965). After failing to record live stag beetles warring — they froze with stage fright before the heat-emitting spotlights — he pivoted toward dead bugs. He made nearly one hundred films across fifty years (many lost), a feat especially unfathomable given the labor necessary to choreograph his actors’ delicate wings and claws: at his most productive, he was only able to shoot six minutes of footage per month.
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