In his works Lev Atamanov subtly conveyed the national coloring of fairy tales and combined romantic elation in images of positive characters with warm and kind humor.
Atamanov’s debut was the short public service announcement Across the Street (1931, with Vladimir Suteev), which explained traffic rules.
He then made one of the first animated sound pictures, The Tale of the Little White Bull (1933), an allegorical anti-Western pamphlet directed against the League of Nations.
[1] In 1936 Atamanov moved to Yerevan where at Armenfilm Studio he directed the first Armenian animated films, Dog and Cat (1938), from a fairy tale by Hovhannes Tumanyan, and The Priest and the Goat (1941).
He later tried out a variety of styles and topics, among them political satire, for example, in That’s in Our Power (1970), from caricatures of Danish Communist cartoonist Herluf Bidstrup, who was popular in the Soviet Union.