Fantasmagorie

A few years ago I had a real passion for short films, seeking them out at festivals and on television, trying to see those considered as established and also those from first time or local artists. This fell off for some reason and I found myself watching more television which is not a problem but I did decide recently I should take the time to watch short films when I have the chance. Fantasmagorie was the one of the shorts I decided to watch, partly for the historical value but also for the good things I heard about it generally.

Watching it once was not enough though, because it is very short but also moves with real speed and energy. The animation consists of chalk drawings on a black background and without any narrative context they flow across the screen, seamlessly turning from one thing into another but making a sort of sense while doing so. Every second of it is creative and clever and engaging and, most importantly, a real joy to watch. The age of the film shows in the quality of the picture (or at least it did in the version I saw) but nowhere else. There is a real pleasure to it, a sense of wonder and excitement in the animation that has stayed with it for over a century.

A great little animation; it has historical value but you will only think of that afterwards because during your several viewings I suspect you'll be too busy keeping up and enjoying the passion and flow that the images have.

Fantasmagorie (1908)

**** (out of 4)

Landmark film in history as this here was the first animated movie ever made. Director Emile Cohl shows us a hand that draws a character and for the next two-minutes we see what is basically chalk animation. There's not too much story here but you'd be somewhat crazy to bash the film for that as everything we do see is rather easy to follow. If you're a fan of D.W. Griffith then you've probably seen his film THOSE AWFUL HATS, which is about some men in a theater who get upset because the women are wearing large hats, which blocks the screen. This here is also shown here in a rather funny way. The animation itself is pretty darn good considering there was nothing made before it to go by. Film buffs will certainly want to check this one out.

Considered the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl's 1908 "Fantasmagorie" departed from J. Stuart Blackton's 1906 "Humorous Phases" by showing a total hand-drawn movie rather than using a combination of live action, cut-out animation as well as hand-drawn scenes.

Cohl was inspired by Blackton's work in reflecting white lines on a black background. However, while Blackton used an actual blackboard to draw his figures, Cohl used 700 paper drawings, 8 drawings for each second, and then shot them onto negative film. He would shoot two frames for each drawing while his film speed was 16 frames per second. Cohl labored 5 months to create this 1 minute, 20 second cartoon. The viewer has to see this movie several times to catch the quick movements of morphings from one set of figures to the next.

Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie is perhaps one of the earliest film depictions of animation, in this case it's chalk drawings on a black board morphing from one scene to another without any real connection except for the way lines keep moving to any shape or form Cohl can think of. And it all happens in the space of two minutes! So, historically, this is one of the most fascinating animated shorts ever. Audiences might have been even more awestruck then than we would be now what with all the improvements that have happened in the nearly one hundred years since then. So for all of the above reasons, this short gets a 10.

Even if it wasn't rightly famous for being the world's first animated film, Fantasmagorie would still stand out as an eye-popping piece of entertainment.

There isn't any story to speak of, and most of it seems to be a kind of stream-of-consciousness, free-form flow of ideas that borders on the surreal. Its use of a human hand to show the initial creation of the drawing brings to mind the much earlier work of J. Stuart Blackton. It might seem a little primitive by today's standards, but this little film is one of the landmarks of cinematic history.

The film can be found on the internet on Youtube or DailyMotion and is worth two minutes of anybody's time.