Listen up, makers of "A Bug's Life"! This is what beetle's lives looked over 100 years ago. Famous Lithuanian director Wladyslaw Starewicz wasn't even 30 years old when he made this and he shot films for over 50 years afterward, but in retrospective it may very well be his most famous work. Nonetheless, I didn't really like it that much. The beetles were animated pretty interestingly and it has nice camera shots on several occasions, like the famous keyhole-shot watching the forbidden, which has become a frequent choice in movie-making since then.
As a whole, however, the story is so confusing and hard to follow that I surely would not have caught the plot at all if I hadn't read it in advance and many details were very difficult to make out and may have gone lost in transition from Starewicz's mind to the tape. The quality is rather weak as well, even for 1912. There's films which are 10-15 years older from that era and were shot in much better quality from a merely physical position. It's worth watching for its historic value mostly to animation or silent movie geeks, but it's definitely not one for broader audiences.
As a whole, however, the story is so confusing and hard to follow that I surely would not have caught the plot at all if I hadn't read it in advance and many details were very difficult to make out and may have gone lost in transition from Starewicz's mind to the tape. The quality is rather weak as well, even for 1912. There's films which are 10-15 years older from that era and were shot in much better quality from a merely physical position. It's worth watching for its historic value mostly to animation or silent movie geeks, but it's definitely not one for broader audiences.