Ladislas Starevich - After World War I

After World War I

Wishing to remain independent, Starevich moved to Fontenay-sous-Bois and started on a series of puppet films that would last for the rest of his life. In these films he was assisted first by his wife France Starevich and later by his daughter Irina (who had changed her name to Irène). The first of these films was Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi (The Frogs That Demand a King, aka Frogland ) (1922), probably the closest Starevich ever came to political commentary in his French films. Following Aesop's fable of the frogs who demand a king from the god Jupiter and are disappointed by the results, the film shows a clear preference not for the pre-monarchial or decadent democracy (which would likely be the slant of an American or French film), but for King Log's form of libertarian government.

During the years at Fontenay-sous-Bois, the Stareviches made two dozen films. Among the most notable are La Voix du rossignol (The Voice of the Nightingale) (1923), a hand-tinted film (some sources say Prizmacolor) starring the young "Nina Starr" (Janina Starevich) and the naturalistic nightingale who convinces her to free him, and Fétiche Mascotte (Duffy the Mascot, aka The Mascot, aka Puppet Love, aka The Devil's Ball) (1934), a long and strange story about a loving dog puppet who practically goes through Hell to get an orange to a girl dying of scurvy, selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time. La Voix du rossignol was awarded the Hugo Riesenfeld Medal for being the "most novel short subject motion picture in the USA during the year 1925".

Often mentioned as being among his best work, The Tale of the Fox (French: Le Roman de Renard, German: Reinicke Fuchs) was also his first animated feature. Although most of the production took place in Paris from 1929–1931, it was finally released in Berlin in 1937 and in France in 1941. It was the third animated feature film to have sound, after Quirino Cristiani's Peludópolis (1931) and The New Gulliver (1935) from the Soviet Union.

Starevich introduced sound and color into his puppet films as soon as they became available. He kept every puppet he made, so stars in one film tended to turn up as supporting characters in later works (the frogs from Grenouilles qui demandent un roi are the oldest of these).

Vladislav Starevich died on 26 February 1965, while working on Comme chien et chat (Like Dog and Cat). It was left unfinished out of respect. He was one of the few European animators to be known by name in America before the 1960s, largely on account of La Voix du rossignol and Fétiche Mascotte (The Tale of the Fox was not widely distributed in the US). His Russian films were known for their dark humor, probably an inevitable consequence of the choice of dead beetles and grasshoppers as subjects. Once he switched to using more ordinary puppets for his French films, his work became more lyrical. However, the fact that he was working independently had the negative effect that the films are sometimes considered too long, too lyrical, and too uncommercial. The films are united, however, by their wild imagination.