Fantasmagorie

Fantasmagorie (1908)

Experience the world’s first hand-drawn film animation

An animated film by French auteur Émile Cohl, one of the earliest examples of hand-drawn film animation. Drawing inspiration from J. Stuart Blackton and the Incoherents of club Hydropathes, the film, with all its wild transformations, sees our protagonist materialize a movie theatre, meet an elephant and escape from jail; A morphing, stream-of-consciousness delight.

Date of release
1908-08-17
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (161)
Runtime
2m
Genres
Animation, Comedy
Director
Émile Cohl

Interesting facts

Fantasmagorie 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.

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).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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