We show that the mean curvature flow for a closed and rotationally symmetric surface can be formulated as an evolution problem consisting of an evolution equation for the square of the function whose graph is rotated and two ODEs describing the evolution of the points of the evolving surface that lie on the rotation axis. For the fully nonlinear and degenerate parabolic problem we establish the well-posedness property in the setting of classical solutions. Besides we prove that the problem features the effect of parabolic smoothing.