[3] Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin was born in Moscow into a Russian family of Mikhail Mikhailovich Kotyonochkin (1900—1941), an accountant and a native Muscovite who died from tuberculosis shortly before the Great Patriotic War, and Eugenia Andreevna Kotyonochkina (née Shirshova) (1906—1962), a housewife whose family moved to Moscow from Kimry, Tver Governorate.

His maternal grandfather Andrei Ivanovich Shirshov came from peasants, while his wife Maria Vasilievna Komissarova belonged to a wealthy family with an estate in Kimry which they had to abandon after the October Revolution.

[4][5] In 1938 he visited a New Year celebration for children at the House of the Unions where they were shown a collection of the first Soviet color animated films.

He picked the project after he accidentally stumbled across the screenwriters Felix Kamov, Arkadi Khait and Aleksandr Kurlyandsky who were wandering around Soyuzmultfilm trying to sell it to the leading directors without any success.

According to Vyacheslav's son and colleagues, as a young man he was rather undisciplined, loved to party and to pull pranks so that at one point he was nearly fired.

Vladimir Vysotsky served as another inspiration and was originally intended to do the voice-over, but wasn't approved by the studio executives.

He managed to create several independent shorts in-between, including another popular comedy The Kitten from Lizyukov Street (1988).

[4][8] During the late perestroika years the Soviet government cut financing and he wasn't able to make anything else up until 1993 when he co-directed two new episodes of Well, Just You Wait!

[4] Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin died on 20 November, 2000 in a Moscow hospital after several years of illness: he suffered from diabetes which led to a gangrene and a stroke.