Vyacheslav
KOTYONOCHKIN

World famous animator


"Please NEVER STOP making Well, Just You Wait!,” wrote fifth-grader Vova Bushuyev

I saw animated cartoons for the first time long before the war, in 1937, at a New Year’s Eve party. I was amazed. *

When thinking about my career, I decided that there definitely would be no Communist party worker with the last name Kotyonochkin. I believed my last name suits animated cartoon making the best.

When I joined Soyuzmultfilm Studios in 1946, it had about a hundred Disney cartoons that were brought in from Germany as loot. I watched these cartoons every morning and learned from them.

The Hare initially had blue eyes, pink cheeks and it was overall very proper. But it took me a lot of time to design the Wolf. Then on the street I saw a guy who was leaning on a wall and smoking a cigarette. He has long black hair and a beer belly, and it suddenly came to me that this was my Wolf.

I thought once, why not to use the theme “don’t offend someone weaker than you, or you will end up making a fool of yourself.” I invited satire writers, Arkady Khait and Alexander Kurlyandsky, and they wrote the script for the Well, Just You Wait! series.

“Please NEVER STOP making Well, Just You Wait!,” - I received this fan letter from fifth-grader Vova Bushuyev from the town of Myasov. Over the years I received huge bags of fan letters. So, I had to shoot 18 episodes in 25 years.

An animated cartoon maker is an actor. He brings his characters to life.

When traffic police officers demanded I show them my driver’s license and saw my last name, they smiled and let me go.

One of the screenwriters for Well, Just You Wait! left the country in the mid-1970s, and production was suspended. After some time, Anatoly Papanov was awarded a prize at the Kremlin. Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet Nikolai Podgorny asked Papanov about the series. Papanov said, “There has been some conflict, one of their producers has left the country.” “Well, but there are still people who remained!”, Podgorny exclaimed.

* The information is based on the accounts of the personas featuring in this section as well as accounts of their family members, acquaintances and colleagues