Fantasmagorie

It may not seem like much to today's audience, who has been exposed to the latest technilogical advances in animation, but Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie is one history's revolutionary groundbreakers in the field. Truly enjoyable and admirable.

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.

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.

What a film this is! The film is under two minutes, and I can't remember half of it. I seem to remember a woman with a very large hat getting it pulled off, pants turning into umbrellas, men getting stabbed an dismembered, but still walking around, houses turning into elephants, and many other images. Cohl seemed to want to include every image he could think of in the film. I'm sure he had no idea of the legacy he would leave. In fact, judging by the showoffy nature of the film, it's almost as if, at the time, Cohl thought he might be one of the only people on the planet who would ever be able to make drawings move like that. Even today, with all the technological advances in the field of animation, "Fantasmagorie" is entertaining. Despite the fact that it has no plot or real point except to show off what animation can do, and despite the relative crudeness of the drawings, its relentless, violent energy, and short running time make it a joy to watch. I wouldn't expect non-animation buffs to care much about it however. They'd probably enjoy it, but would have hard time understanding the fuss.

Émile Cohl, a French caricaturist, is often described as "The Father of the Animated Cartoon." Considered the first fully-animated film, his two-minute 1908 film 'Fantasmagorie' {alternatively, in English: 'A Fantasy,' 'Black and White,' or 'Metamorphosis'} is made up on approximately 700 double-exposed drawings, using what is known as a "chalk-line effect" (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to give the impression of white chalk on a black chalkboard), a technique probably borrowed from early animator James Stuart Blackton. A fast-paced, confusing and almost-surreal short film, 'Fantasmagorie' is loaded with dozens of tiny seconds-long scenes, which rapidly metamorphosise into the next, possibly a stylistic tribute to the short-lived, long-forgotten Incoherent Movement of the 1880s, of which Cohl had been a part. The title of the film itself is taken from the word "fantasmograph," which referred to a magic lantern that could project ghostly images across walls.

Not following any standard narrative, 'Fantasmagorie' is really quite difficult to follow. The film starts with a hand quickly sketching a dangling clown, which instantly transforms into a large man in an elevator, which materialises into a man in a cinema whose view is suddenly blocked by a woman with a tall feathery hat. This scene, probably the longest single sequence at about 20 seconds, shows the man desperately trying to glimpse the screen again by peeling away the feathers of the hat, only for the women's head to suddenly expand into a large bubble for the next scene transition. The remainder of the film is a hectic jumble of jumping about, fishing, sword-fighting, canons, flowers, milk bottles, elephants turning into houses and, for the grand finale, a character departing into the left-hand side of the screen on a horse.

I found 'Fantasmagorie' to be quite an interesting early short, though it moved much, much too quickly to be solidly enjoyable (J. Stuart Blackton made a much more accessible film two years earlier with 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces'). Nonetheless, the film carries great historical importance in the field of animation, and Cohl's style undoubtedly influenced such animators as Winsor McCay, perhaps most famous for his 1914 animated short film, 'Gertie the Dinosaur.'