Fantasmagorie, the world's first fully animated cartoon, was released on Aug 17, 1908: Watch it here (2024)

New Delhi,UPDATED: Aug 18, 2017 15:21 IST

On August 17, 1908, the Gaumont company in Paris released Fantasmagorie, the world's first fully animated cartoon created by Emile Cohl in the traditional hand-drawn animation style. The film depicting crazy images morphing fluidly from one to the next is a tribute to the Incoherent Art Movement of France which had been almost forgotten by that time. This later gave birth to many of the techniques used in avant-garde art later on.

The film takes its name from the fantasmograph, a 19th century lantern which projects shadowy images on the wall. The French term 'fantasmagorie' is defined as "a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined."

Fantasmagorie depicts a stick man moving around and interacting with a few objects. The most striking sequence is a character sitting at the cinema behind a woman with a huge pineapple-like feathery hat which he then proceeds to rip apart layer after layer.

In a stream of consciousness style, Cohl's hand sketching the characters is also included in some of the frames.

The film ends with the protagonist riding off on horseback to the left of the screen.

"Fantasmagorie is a brief line animation in which a mysterious puppet, Pierrot or fantoche, and his environment change seamlessly. Flowers become bottles become a cannon; an elephant becomes a house; Pierrot becomes a bubble, a hat, a valise," writes Chris Gehman, and Steve Reinke in the book The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema.

The film needs to be watched repetitively as the movements are often too fast to keep track of what is going on. With its fantastic style that is unlike the realist tradition of the time, Fantasmagorie is a masterpiece which anticipates the Surrealistic movement of the future.

What technique did Cohl use to create the film?

Emile Cohl worked for around five months to create Fantasmagorie, from February 1908 to either May or June, creating 700 drawing to flesh out the 1 minute 20 second film. To do this, Cohl used an illuminated glass plate and traced consecutive drawings with the variations needed so that the film could consistent movement and continuity among the drawings.

Though the film looks like the popular chalkboard caricatures of the time, it is actually made from pen on paper drawings which were then double exposed to create a negative film effect of white lines on black. This 'chalk line effect' was inspired by a famous early animator, James Stuart Blackton.

The film projected at a rate of 16 frames per second was created just by Cohl and a camera assistant. Cohl made eight drawings for each second and photographed each image twice. The drawings were placed one by one on a lightbox and photographed, changing their positions as needed.

"At the beginning and end Cohl's own hands appeared in positive, necessitating in these two shots the use of white ink on black paper to match the negative animation sequence," Donald Crafton says in his book Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film.

About the 'father of animated cartoon' Emile Cohl

Emile Cohl was born to working class parents and did not have a very privileged childhood. Cohl's artistic capabilities were discovered at the boarding school he was enrolled in at the age of seven. With the Franco-Prussian war in progress, Cohl came under the influence of political caricature and puppet drama.

In the 1880s and 90s, Cohl developed himself as a caricaturist, writer and cartoonist. He worked as the assistant to famous caricaturist Andre Gill. He joined the Gaumont film company as a writer in 1908 and moved on to directing various kinds of films before moving on to animation.

America's J. Stuart Blackton was already working with animation and his works-- Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Haunted Hotel (1907) -- were introducing wonderful new possibilities in the film industry. Cohl became Europe's first cartoon filmmaker.

The animation style Cohl developed saw human figures changing into unexpected images which did away with notions of logical sequence or reality. He used puppets, drawings and cut outs among other objects to create more than 250 films within the period of 1908 and 1923. Around only 37 film survive in film archives. The Neo-Impressionist Painter (1910), Cohl's most famous work, mocks impressionist paintings.

The 'father of animated cartoon' as he is remembered among animated film circles, inspired many great animation artists of the future such as Walt Disney, Tex Avery, and Max and Dave Fleischer.

How did Fantasmagorie change the film industry in Europe?

After Blackton's The Haunted Hotel was released by Vitagraph in April 1907 to a great success, Gaumont asked its employees to uncover the "mystery of The Haunted Hotel". Following this, Cohl studied the frames used in the film thoroughly to understand the animation techniques used.

Fantasmagorie managed to lift "cartoons out of the realm of trick films and started them on the path toward animated features". While Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by Blackton shows separate vignettes of various characters, Cohl's film has a beautiful fluidity that weaves one frame with the next. This shows a higher level of 'visual tricks' than seen in previous instances of animation.

Which popular animations came before Fantasmagorie?

The first ever animation was the oldest surviving advertisem*nt of Bryant and May's Matches -- Matches: An Appeal (1899). Created by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, it used single frame exposures of models to ultimately create moving images. Watch it here.

The Enchanted Drawing (1900), a silent film directed by and starring J. Stuart Blackton, was the first standard film that included animated sequences with stop motion animation and certain early visual effects.

Though other primitive methods of animation such as flipbooks existed before, Fantasmagorie was the first fully animated cartoon as per historians and was created using traditional animation techniques.

Cartoons or animated short films rose to popularity in the 1910s and short cartoons were created for movie theatres. It was only after this that the cel animation process was created which included "a sheet of transparent celluloid that is placed on top of a background drawing," that could save time and labour by allowing frames to be selectively duplicated.

Check out the full film of Fantasmagorie here:

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