At the age of twelve he came into possession of a photographic plates folding camera, became engaged in photography and organized a home darkroom.
[2] From 1954 to 1956 he studied at the art school, and from 1956 to 1959 — at the animation courses under Soyuzmultfilm led by Fyodor Khitruk where he met his future wife and regular collaborator Galina Barinova.
[4][5] By the mid-1960s he was already teaching his own students; he developed a unique programme and spent over 40 years as an educator, both at Soyuzmultfilm and VGIK animation courses.
[8] The original team included Gennady Sokolsky, Leonid Nosyrev and Valery Ugarov who later made successful individual careers, but also regularly helped each other.
Based on the fairy tale by Gianni Rodari about a distracted boy who literally fell apart, it was accused by the head of the State Committee for Cinematography Alexei Romanov for "using children's cinema as a polygon for abstract art propaganda".
All characters were drawn and animated after famous Western movie actors such as Jean Gabin, Paul Newman and Mel Ferrer, and the visual effect created through the use of multilayered celluloid, moving virtual camera, the use of light and color came close to the modern-day CGI.
[3] Petrov was sure that realism could be achieved by traditional methods of animation, without any additional tricks such as filming, photography and technical devices.
[1][5][7] As the film historian Georgy Borodin wrote, "for many years film directors who had been working in 3D computer graphics and who owned technical resources incomparable to those of Petrov's couldn't even come close to the screen life of three-dimensional hand-drawn characters created by Petrov using only his golden hands".