Wladyslaw Starewicz was born in Moscow, Russia. His parents were of Polish ancestry but had lived in Lithuania. The boy was raised by his grandmother in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. He attended secondary school in Estonia, followed by the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was director of a museum of natural history in Kovno. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to film the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on. Inspired by a viewing of "Les allumettes animées" [Animated Matches] (1908) by Emile Cohl, Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: he removed the legs and mandibles from two beetle carcasses, then re-attached them with wax, creating articulated puppets. The result was the short film "Lucanus Cervus" (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film with a plot.
In 1911, Starewicz moved to Moscow and began work with a film company known variously as Khanzonkow or Khazhonkov. There he made two dozen films, most of them puppet animations using dead animals. Of these, "The Beautiful Leukanida" (1912), a fairy tale for beetles, earned international acclaim, (one British reviewer was tricked into thinking the stars were live trained insects), while "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (1911) got Starewicz decorated by the czar. But the best film of this period, perhaps of his entire career, was "Mest' kinematografičeskogo operatora" [Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman, aka The Cameraman's Revenge] (1912), a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects. Some of the films made for Khazonkow feature live-action/animation interaction. In some cases, the live action consisted of footage of Starewicz's daughter Irina.
During World War I, Starewicz worked for several film companies, directing 60 live-action features, some of which were fairly successful. After the October Revolution of 1917, the film community largely sided with the White Army and moved from Moscow to Yalta on the Black Sea. After a brief stay, Starewicz and his family fled before the Red Army could capture the Crimea, stopping in Italy for a while before joining the Russian émigrés in Paris. There, they formed a company in the remains of Georges Méliès' old studio. At this time, Wladislaw Starewicz changed his name to Ladislas Starevich, presumably because it was easier to pronounce in French. He made one animated film for this studio, "The Scarecrow", before it dissolved, with most of the Russians joining the Berlin or Hollywood studios.
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 Iréne). The first of these films was "Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi" [The Frogs That Demand a King, aka Frogland (US)] (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 but decadent democracy (which would be the slant of an American or French film), but instead sides with King Log as a 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" [Voice of the Nightingale] (1923), a quite-beautiful hand-tinted film starring the young "Nina Starr" (Iréna Starevich) and the naturalistic nightingale who convinces her not to cage it, 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. The animator's best work was supposedly his first animated feature, La roman de Renard [Tale of Renard the Fox] (1939), which took him ten years to make.
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).
Ladislas Starevich died on February 26, 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 1960's, largely on account of "La Voix du rossignol" and "Fétiche Mascotte" (La roman de Renard was not widely distributed in this country). 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 often too long, too lyrical, and too uncommercial. The films are united by their wild imagination.
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