He also produced hand-made cartoons by drawing humorous scenes from the life of his neighbours on a transparent filmstrip and demonstrating them to a great success.
[3] In 1951, Popov was employed by Soyuzmultfilm; for the next ten years he had been working as an animator with Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya, Leonid Amalrik and other leading directors.
[3] Their most popular work of that time was Umka (1969), a traditionally animated short about a little polar bear loved by generations of children, along with the lullaby song performed by Aida Vedishcheva.
Among his popular films were adaptations of Nikolay Nosov's Bobik Visiting Barbos (1977) and Yuri Koval's The Adventures of Vasya Kurolesov (1981).
Yet his biggest success was the Three from Prostokvashino trilogy produced in 1978–1984 and based on the comedy fairy tales by Eduard Uspensky.