Fantasmagorie (film)

Fantasmagorie
Fantasmagorie
	A still from the film
Directed by	Émile Cohl
Produced by	Émile Cohl
Animation by	Émile Cohl
Distributed by	Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont
Release date	17 August 1908;
Running time	1 minute, 45 seconds (including the titles); 1 minute, 20 seconds (standalone animation)
Country	France
Language	None / Silent film

Fantasmagorie (also called 'A Fantasy') is a 1908 French animated short film by Émile Cohl. It is one of the earliest examples of traditional (hand-drawn) animation, and considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.^[1]

Description

The film largely consists of a stick man moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower which becomes an elephant. There are also sections of live action where the animator's hands enter the scene. The main character is drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters are a clown and a gentleman. Other characters include a woman in a movie theater wearing a large hat with gigantic feathers, and a strongman.

The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is taken from the original French word for "phantasmagoria", a mid-19th century magic lantern show with moving images of ghosts.^[2]

History

Fantasmagorie (1908)

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 style. The film was released on 17 August 1908.

In 2008, when the film turned 100 years old, the Serbian artist Rastko Ćirić created a film called "Fantasmagorie 2008" to celebrate 100 years of the film and pay homage to Cohl.^[3]

Production

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 exposed twice (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes.

Cohl probably copied the blackboard-style from J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).

References

^ Beckerman, Howard (1 September 2003). Animation: the whole story. Skyhorse Publishing Inc. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-58115-301-9. Retrieved 16 August 2011.
^ Vilas-Boas, Eric; Maher, John, eds. (5 October 2020). "The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation". Vulture. The next year, Cohl made Fantasmagorie, whose title is a reference to the "fantasmograph," a mid-19th-century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images onto surrounding walls.
^ https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/fantasmagorie-2008-5759.ht^{[permanent dead link‍]} ^{[bare URL]}