[2] Leonid was born to Anna Mikhailovna and Aleksey Ivanovich Amalrik, an employee and later an inspector at the Russia insurance company, a distinguished citizen of Moscow.
He was raised by the French colony in Moscow as Ivan Ivanovich Amalrik and later joined the Albert Hübner's Calico Manufactory.
He would later direct a part-autobiographical film A Girl and an Elephant (1969) based on Aleksandr Kuprin's story as well as his childhood memories.
From 1926 to 1928 he worked at Mezhrabpom-Rus as a scene painter assistant under Abram Room, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.
The director himself explained it as a result of his radical formalistic "anti-Disney" vision and some featured themes that seemed suspicious to them.
[9] In 1939 he joined forces with Vladimir Polkovnikov, and together they directed a trilogy Limpopo (1939), Barmaley (1941) and Peacock's Tail (1946) based on the Doctor Aybolit fairy tales, all shot in full color using the three-color filming process by Pavel Mershin (the color copies of the first two shorts are considered to be lost).
During the first month of war Amalrik gathered a group of those few animators left in the city, including Olga and Nikolai Khodataev, and they produced several anti-Hitler sketches that were released under the Kino-Circus name in 1942.
In 1958 he directed The Cat's House, "an animated opera parody" based on the fairy tale in verse by Samuil Marshak with the score written by Nikita Bogoslovsky.