| Fantasmagorie | |
|---|---|
.GIF) 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 |
|
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
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.
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).
Physical Film Registries
Multiple versions of Fantasmagorie are preserved in film archives, including:
- Academy Film Archive - Holds a 16 mm print of the film, described as the only surviving full-frame copy. [3] The print was sourced by Serge Bromberg, then artistic director of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, for the festival's 2008 edition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the film's release.
This print was donated to the Academy Film Archive by David Shepard, who received the film from his high school friend John Doublier.[4] Doublier's grandfather, Francis Doublier, was a Lumière operator sent to the United States in 1902 to establish the Lumière North American Company in Burlington, Vermont, at the request of the Lumière brothers.[5]
- Gaumont Film Company - Holds a 35 mm copy of the film, recorded from the Academy Film Archive's 16 mm copy, which was digitally restored and cleaned at the request of Serge Bromberg.[6] This copy was then scanned at 2K resolution.
The master negative is presumed lost; like many silent-era films, it may have been destroyed through nitrate deterioration, archival neglect, or the recovery of silver from film stock. [7]
See also
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.
- Beck, Jerry, ed. (20 May 2008). "France Claims First Animated Film". Variety (Magazine).
Annecy artistic director Serge Bromberg scoured the world to find the best print to show at this year's fest, where the short will screen as part of a retrospective on early animation. To his surprise, he found a vintage 16 mm print, thought to be the only surviving full-frame original copy, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
- Shepard, John (26 December 2007). "New 3-DVD, 7-hour Set: Saved from the Flames" (Forum post).
David Shepard was a high school friend of John Doublier whose grandfather, Francis Doublier, was one of the original Lumière Cinematographe operators sent to America in 1896. M. Doublier stayed behind to manage a film printing and processing laboratory in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in 1957, gave David the original copies of this film and of Fantasmagorie.
- Aucliar, Clara (2021). "Thinking with Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum". In Bernardi, Joanne; Cherchi Usai, Paolo; Williams, Tami; Yumibe, Joshua (eds.). Provenance and Early Cinema. Indiana University Press. pp. 129–130. ISBN 9780253052995.
In 1902, tired of image hunting, he was sent by the Lumière Brothers to open a photographic plates production plant in Burlington, Vermont, where he worked until it was shut down in 1911.
- Beck, Jerry, ed. (20 May 2008). "France Claims First Animated Film". Variety (Magazine).
It is this 16mm print, which Gaumont recently scanned in 2K, digitally cleaned and recorded back to 35mm, that will screen at Annecy.
- Hotlz, Kate (20 August 2025). "The Lost Treasures of Early Cinema: How Most Silent Films Were Lost to Time". Massive Action Media.
Silent films were made using nitrate film stock, a highly flammable and chemically unstable material. Nitrate film deteriorates over time, becoming brittle, discolored, and prone to spontaneous combustion...Many studios intentionally destroyed old film reels to make space in their archives or to salvage the silver from the nitrate stock.
External links
- Fantasmagorie at IMDb
- Fantasmagorie is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
- Emile Cohl – Fantasmagorie 1908 on YouTube