The Mascot, Pioneering Stop Animation Film, by Wladyslaw Starewicz


The Mas­cot is a 1934 film by the Russ­ian ani­ma­tor Wla­dys­law Starewicz. The film pio­neered a num­ber of stop ani­ma­tion tech­niques, mak­ing it a sem­i­nal film in the his­to­ry of ani­ma­tion. About Starewicz’s film, the great ani­ma­tor Ter­ry Gilliam wrote:

His work is absolute­ly breath­tak­ing, sur­re­al, inven­tive and extra­or­di­nary, encom­pass­ing every­thing that Jan Svankma­jer, Waler­ian Borow­czyk and the Quay Broth­ers [see below] would do sub­se­quent­ly…. It is impor­tant, before you jour­ney through all these mind-bend­ing worlds, to remem­ber that it was all done years ago, by some­one most of us have for­got­ten about now. This is where it all began.

You can find The Mas­cot in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.