Fantasmagorie is an 1908 French

French Film

French Film is a 2008 British comedy film directed by Jackie Oudney and starring Anne-Marie Duff, Hugh Bonneville, Victoria Hamilton, Douglas Henshall and Eric Cantona. The film was shot in Spring 2007 at various locations around London including Waterloo station and the BFI Southbank.-Plot:Two...

 animated

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

 film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 by Émile Cohl

Émile Cohl

Émile Cohl , born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a French caricaturist of the largely forgotten Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".-Biography:Émile's father Elie was a rubber salesman, and his mother, Emilie...

. It is one of the earliest examples of traditional (hand-drawn) animation

Traditional animation

Traditional animation, is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand...

, and considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.

Description

The film largely consists of a stick figure

Stick figure

A stick figure is a very simple type of drawing made of lines and dots, often of the human form or other animals. In a stick figure, the head is represented by a circle, sometimes embellished with details such as eyes, mouth or crudely scratched-out hair. The arms, legs and torso are all...

 moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The main character is drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters are a clown

Clown

Clowns are comic performers stereotypically characterized by the grotesque image of the circus clown's colored wigs, stylistic makeup, outlandish costumes, unusually large footwear, and red nose, which evolved to project their actions to large audiences. Other less grotesque styles have also...

 and a gentleman

Gentleman

The term gentleman , in its original and strict signification, denoted a well-educated man of good family and distinction, analogous to the Latin generosus...

.

The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement

Incoherents

The Incoherents was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as...

. The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern

Magic lantern

The magic lantern or Laterna Magica is an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century.-Operation:The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture , and...

 that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.

History

Cohl worked on "Fantasmagorie" from February to either May or June 1908. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a "stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions.Stream-of-consciousness writing...

" style.

The film was released on August 17, 1908.

Making of

The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look.

It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes. It borrowed from J. Stuart Blackton

J. Stuart Blackton

James Stuart Blackton , usually known as J. Stuart Blackton, was an Anglo-American film producer of the Silent Era, the founder of Vitagraph Studios and among the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation...

, the "chalk-line effect"; filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard. Blackton and Cohl also borrowed some technics from Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès , full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects...

, such as the stop trick

Stop trick

A stop trick is a film special effect. It occurs when an object is filmed, then while the camera is off, the object is moved out of sight of the camera, then the camera is turned back on. When the film is watched it thus seems to the viewer that object disappears.Georges Méliès accidentally...

.