Fantasmagorie (1908) Director: Émile Cohl
★★★☆☆
Produced by the Gaumont Company in France, Fantasmagorie is a stream-of-consciousness silent cartoon that uses innovative stop-motion cinematography (which was first pioneered in America). The title of the film is a nod to the fantasmograph, a 19th century device which predated modern movie-making. I was interested to learn that Émile Cohl actually drew the objects seen in the film on hundreds of white backgrounds, and then flipped the colors to negative.
Fantasmagorie is a unique, hand-drawn, absurdist cartoon –it is often regarded as the first animated film. It consists of one stick-figure clown who encounters various odd situations. Objects randomly transform into various other things, such as a glass bottle morphing into an elephant and so on. Several times, Mr. Cohl’s hands appear to change the cartoon onscreen in a notable moment of breaking the fourth wall. This brilliant, albeit wandering little cartoon, is an experimentation which anticipates the rise of Disney and Pixar and other great animators.
Émile Cohl (1857-1938) produced a wide variety of films as part of the “Incoherent Movement,” an early and short-lived French movement that predated the latter avant-garde movement. His greatest film Fantasmagorie is a top example of early animation. It is now freely available to watch online as it has entered the public domain.