Trollheart

Animation in Germany may have been somewhat stifled with the rise of the Nazis and therefore the imprisonment, execution or flight to exile of some of the most creative minds in the Reich, but Spain had its very own Civil War, which raged from 1936 to 1939, and you would wonder how, already devastated by three years of bloodshed, Spanish animators could flourish, or even survive, in such a climate, yet they did.

Joaquin Xaudaro, who had in 1917 produced the first Spanish animation Jim Trot's Adventures, created Un drama en la costa in 1933 just prior to his death, having created the previous year SEDA, the Societe Espanola de Dibujos Animados, an art collective which was responsible for four animated films in all, one of which being the abovementioned. The year of Xaudaro's death also saw the release of K-Hito (born Ricardo Garcia Lopez)'s "El Rata Primera" while the next year he created Francisca la Mujer Fatal. The final film produced at SEDA was Francisco Lopez Rubio's Seranata, also in 1934. This, sadly, means that SEDA survived for a mere two years, and just as sadly, none of the animations mentioned above seem to have survived to this day.

The demise of Xaudro's dream however did not stop the rise of Spanish animation, and in 1935 Jose Martinez Romano and the caricature artist known only as Menda released Una de abono and the western short, Buffalo Full. Again, YouTube searches yield nothing. Puppets were then used in an animation directed by movie director Adolfo Aznar, for "Pipo y Pipa en busca de Colcin" (you guessed it: zero results!) followed by Feliciano Perez and Arturo Beringola's El intrepido Raul.

The Edad Dorada

Anyone with most passing acquaintance with or knowledge of the Spanish language will know that the legendary city of El Dorado means “city of gold”, and the period just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, from the 1940s, was nicknamed El Edad Dorada, “the golden age”, as it became the pinnacle of early Spanish animation. Choosing to side with neither power in World War II, the newly-established dictator General Franco needed nationalist expression in film and animation, and so he became something of a patron of the arts – as long as they reflected traditional (approved) Spanish values and ideals, and praised his new government. However it turned out to be not the capital, Madrid, which would be the centre of the great birthplace of Spanish animation, but Barcelona.

The Reverse Disney Principle

Whereas in the USA Walt Disney worked with his animators – and had been one himself, a cartoonist first, working for another studio before he set his own up, as we saw earlier – the Spanish idea, at least in Barcelona, was for entrepreneurs to engage and employ artists and animators, and they would deal with the government offices to get them contracts and keep the finances in order. Two of the main movers in this field were Jaume Baguna and Alejandro Fernandez de la Reguera, the former of which set up Hispano Grafic Films in 1939. Their first effort was a seven-episode series based on a comic character, Juanito Milhombres, while de la Reguera founded Dibsono Films, which released SOS Doctor Marabu in 1940. It garnered praise as “one of the most remarkable, fluid and brilliant films of its time”, and of course, it's nowhere to be found. Interestingly, it appears that the Spanish may have been the first to have a proper antihero in one of their animations, this being the crotchety old Don Cleque, a bald, sickly, ugly man, and no, I can't find a single instance of him on YouTube either.

In 1942 the two great studios merged, becoming Dibujos Animados Chamartin, which based itself in the historic surroundings of Antonio Gaudi's Paseo de Gracia and continued the adventures of sad old Don Cleque, while also adding an anthropomorphic bull (well, this was Spain!) called Civilon, both of whom were given an entire series, as was Garabatos, a caricature show which heaped scorn on El Presidente's enemies. DAC lasted till 1945 only, when the studios were to be moved to Madrid, and the company dissolved when Jaume Baguna quit.

That same year though, Arturo Moreno got the chance to make Spain's first full-length animated feature movie, thanks to an offer from animation studio Balet y Blay, and Garbancito de la Mancha would also be the first Spanish cartoon to be produced in colour. Amazingly, there actually is a clip of this, though it literally is a clip, just over a minute long. It shows promise, certainly better than some of the German animation we recently looked at, but it's hard to form an opinion on such a short excerpt. Still, it does look as if Spanish animation was in decent shape at this time.

His next project (spoken of in "A History of World Animation" as, I quote, “boring”) was another feature-length effort, and again rather surprisingly I can find a small clip of it, which I've posted below. Reference to Max Fleischer's work and style has been made in the book regarding both movies, and I guess there are similarities. They are certainly more Fleishcher than Disney, anyway.

Los Suenos de Tay-Pi, produced by Franz Winterstein with the departure of Moreno for Venezuela, sounds a whole lot more interesting, with tuxedo-wearing monkeys and crying crocodiles, but this is where our luck runs out. It's also where the luck ran out for Balet y Blay, whose last film this turned out to be, and a total flop at that. Animators from the closed Chamartin studios produced Erase una vez, based on the Cinderella tale, and in contrast to the abovementioned it seems to have come in for some serious praise, though it was not a success when released, but again there is no video for it. Sadly, as the title translates to “once upon a time”, there are plenty of hits, but nothing close to what I'm looking for.

In Madrid, Salvador Gijon had a successful series involving a detective and a dog, which ran right up to the sixties and is perhaps the second instance of the sidekick being a dog, the first being in the French animation I featured earlier, Paul Grimault's Les Passagers de la Grand Ourse, while puppets were back in vogue for Angel Echenique and his "Ciudad de los munecos" (1945) and ex-SEDA alumnus Manuel Alonso Anino made intriguing drawings with shadows, but the shadows were too angular and pronounced “ugly”, and looked very dated. Valencia also saw its share of animators, among them Jose Maria Reyes, Carlos Rigalt and Joachin Perez Arroyo.

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Trollheart

Another country that struggled with fascism in the thirties and forties was of course Italy, but unlike Germany's dictator, Mussolini does not seem to have had any interest in cartoons, and so the story of Italian animation (at least, early animation and probably later too) is short and contains few names, and fewer movies. Luigi Liberio Pensuti is said to have been the only animator to have worked constantly in the country, heading up the state institution for cinematography, the Isituto Nazionale Luce in 1935. Most of his work, unsurprisingly, was propaganda for the Fascist Party, like 1941's Il dottor Churkill, which lampoons Churchill as a Jekyll and Hyde figure. As an animation it's not too bad really, with the hideously deformed Hydelike creature drinking a potion labelled “Democrazia” (anyone?) and transforming into the urbane British Prime Minister. The music even changes, from dark, ominous, sub-Hammer style horror score to a breezy, nonchalant twenties upbeat swing as Churchill transforms.

He's seen envisioning the Union Jack over all the world, and then robbing people's houses (I think; it's all in Italian obviously and a little hard to be sure) whereupon he reverts back to the Mister Hyde figure (perhaps showing his true colours? Kind of surprised the Hyde persona is not shown as a caricature of a Jew) and has to drink his “democracy” potion to again take the form of the statesman. Just as he's doing this though, an arm with a swastika on it grabs him, causing him to break the tube with the potion, and he is pursued by the Nazis in his Hyde form. He makes it to his little plane but is pursued by the Luftwaffe, which turns into a bombing raid on London, which is destroyed as the victorious Nazis fly off.

The brothers Cossio, Carlo and Vittorio, made some shorts in the thirties, including "La secchia rapita (The broken bucket)" and even a version of HG Wells's classic The Time Machine, which was released in 1937. However, as they were one of the few people experimenting with colour in Italy at the time, to say nothing of stereoscopy, the costs proved prohibitive and they abandoned their ventures. It's pretty primitive though, even if they deserve praise for trying to integrate colour into their work: most of their characters don't seem to move, or only one body part (usually the head) does at a time, and the animation itself is far from fluid, jumping all over the place where you can see clearly they used cutouts and just positioned them, filmed them, positioned them again and so on. Quite poor I feel, given the time period and the advances that were taking place half a world away.

Invited by painter Luigi Giobbe, who had made his own film in 1940, they made two more short films based on Neapolitan stories: Pulcinella e i briganti and Pulcinella et i temporale, but that seems to have been about it for the two brothers. And, indeed, Giobbe, who probably went back to painting. Ugo Siatta tried something with puppets (again with the puppets!) this time set in the Middle Ages, called Teste di legno, or Wooden Balls. Sorry. Heads. Wooden Heads.

Someone a little more eceletic was Luciano Emmer, who used frescoes and shots of a famous chapel. He created an animation called "Racconto di un affresco" (Story of a fresco) – apologies for the terrible video below: I don't know why it's shaking so badly but it's the only version I can find. Probably don't watch if you're prone to epileptic seizures, as it's very jumpy indeed.

There was also Antonio Rubino, and Nino Pagot, who like most other Italian artists and animators had to work on propaganda films in order to continue to be able to eat. Pagot created the largest animation establishment in Italy and invited his brother Toni to join him there. After the defeat and death of Mussolini, and the end of World War II, he went on to create a feature film, Lalla, picolla Lalla in 1946. Although there is only a tiny fragment of it available, it already looks far superior to anything I've seen come out of Italy, with a very Disney Alice in Wonderland/Mister Bug Goes to Town feel, at least the little I've seen. As for his other feature films, I fratelli dinamite was created by him and some other Italian animators who had just returned from a German POW camp, after Italy had switched sides in the war after 1943, and it concerns the fantasy adventures of three brothers, told in narration by their aunt to dinner guests. The animation is pretty first-class, though in fairness it was released in 1949, so by now animation had made great strides and would soon move to the new medium of television. Still, for struggling Italian animation this is right up there with the best. One of the scenes takes place in Hell – a bold move which I believe not even Disney had ... oh wait, Fantasia. Yeah, well, a move which no other animator other than Disney had attempted up to then – and it's quite well done, with children being taken from a sack by a Satan figure who is sort of a cross between a carnival barker and Santa, and zipped into various costumes of animals and other things, which then become animate.

The last major animation around this period (I realise we've stretched the timeline a lot here, but there really is not much Italian animation to fill up this section) was by Anton Gino Domeneghini, and entitled La Rosa di Bagdad, another full-length feature whose storyline borrowed liberally from Snow White, as did the design of the characters, who bear rather too close a resemblance to Disney's dwarfs than Domeneghini would perhaps have preferred. Jesus! They even have a bald one with a big nose and beard who, with a droopy cap and the beard removed, would be identical to Dopey! Though this movie did well for him in the box office, it had taken over seven years to produce, and Domeneghini was an ad-man first and last, and he promptly gave up his efforts to be an animator, returning to the world of advertising.

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Key

unrelated but your avatar is wonderful

Trollheart

Thanks man. Decided to play Batty at his own game, turn my weakness into a strength. Plus it is cool.

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grindy

It's still a weakness.

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Trollheart

You're a weakness.

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grindy

Yes, I am every woman's weakness.

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grindy

Fück yöü böth.

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Trollheart

Picking this back up again two years later, what better way to continue than to go, um, backwards? See, it seems to me that I got a little caught up in what we’ll call the start of the Disney era, and thereafter based all my research on animation outside of the USA on that period. But hell, you can go a long way back outside the borders of the United States to find people in Europe who were working on animation - at least, of a kind; crude, obviously, but still important - and who really should be looked into.

So I want to continue the “UnAmerican Animation” feature but take a look back to before the 1930s. Well before, in fact, and run through what countries in the UK and Europe (and even, I see, Ireland!) were doing in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Nothing groundbreaking, I guess, but it seems there was a fair deal of animation development and experimentation going on even then.

UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part III)
Well, obviously you’re going to get a few people claiming to be the father of animation, including Uncle Walt and his rival Max Fleishcher, though in reality people like Paul Grimault and Lotte Reinenger are probably better candidates. Seems you can even go all the way back to the ancients, who painted “moving scenes” on jars and things, that are accepted as being animation in their own right. But I’m not concerned with such prehistoric examples, and in the course of my research since leaving this on hiatus in 2017 I've found it hard to come up with a definitive answer as to who is responsible for the birth of animation. Therefore I present these examples of men who can possibly be called

The Godfathers of Animation

Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844-1918)

With an engineer for a father and an artist for a mother, Reynaud was perfectly placed to become one of the first animators, improving upon the zoetrope, a device that spun and showed painted figures which appeared to move as the watcher viewed them through slits cut in the cylinder, with his praxinoscope, which improved the design by replacing the simple slits with mirrors, making the images as they passed by more fluid and less distorted that those seen through the zoetrope. Originally sold as a very successful toy, Reynaud began to think about using it as a projector, by having a large screen in front of the praxinoscope, onto which he could project his “moving” figures. In essence, it seems this was the first example, almost, of a movie projector. However Reynaud failed to patent it and a few short years later the Lumière brothers created and patented the first real movie camera, the cinematograph, and that was the end of his invention.

The théâtre optique

Literally, the optical theatre, this was the improved version of Reynaud’s praxinoscope, the one with the ability to project the figures onto a screen. Reynaud’s first performance was for some select friends, and was called “Un Bon Bock” (a good beer) and they were so impressed by it that he then set up the théâtre optique. However the popularity of his machine turned out to be something of a two-edged sword. Two of its main drawbacks were that it was very fragile, and could easily break if not handled and treated properly, and in addition the only way to operate it was by hand, which meant that when Reynaud secured a contract with the Grévin Museum in 1892 for daily performances of the machine, he had to be there personally to turn the thing. Not quite sure why he couldn’t have paid someone else to do it, but that’s what it says. Maybe the museum wanted him to be there personally in case anyone had any questions, or maybe they didn’t (or he didn’t) trust anyone else to work the apparatus. Maybe it was just in the contract that it had to be him.

Whatever the reason, the Grévin also demanded new films every year, while a clause in the contract (did he not read it before signing such a draconian document?) prevented him from selling any of his films outside of France. The grind of being tied into this contract, all his time taken up literally turning the handle of the praxinoscope and coming up with new material for it, allied to the as already alluded to invention of the cinematograph, which was to make his machine obsolete only a few years later, all led to Reynaud testily dumping his films into the Seine, where they were destroyed. Sadly, nothing exists today except this one clip I was able to track down. It does, however, make the jaw drop when you see the techniques used and remember this was at the tail-end of the nineteenth century!

Sure. you can see through the figure and it’s obvious he’s made of paper, but look how he moves! Or seems to, I should say. Look how the brightly-painted figure of the woman appears to emerge from a door to the right and walk onto the “stage”. When Pierrot enters, he comes through a door that just appears in the wall, but it’s believable as an entrance. And the figures genuinely seem to interact with each other. Remember, these are just static drawings being projected on a screen. When the door opens there’s a square of light on the floor too, as if a real door had opened, and when the first figure we saw goes behind a pillar, he disappears completely, in that sort of animation-doesn’t-obey-the-laws-of-physics thing I talked about in the section on "Plane Crazy" and also on Felix, both of whom were almost thirty-five years later. Now the reconstruction shown in the video was admittedly a hundred years later, but you have to assume that all they did was restored it, not upgraded or updated it in any way, in which case it’s a stunning achievement for the time.

I think Reynaud has a good claim to being named the actual father of animation, though history precludes him from this as he was not ultimately successful, and was largely forgotten as the cinematograph took over and the Lumière brothers passed instead into the history books. At the heart of the unhappy inventor’s failure was the reliance on temperamental machinery that was very delicate, but more, the one-man-band idea, the artisan who worked alone. While the Lumières made a business out of their new machine, had it easily mass-produced and were able to show people how to use it, Reynaud, a true remnant of the nineteenth century compared to the forward-looking, almost futurist Lumières, laboured on alone and refused to involve big business or investors, and like all the “little guys” in every developing industry, he was crushed by the wheels of advancing technology. He died after a short spell in a hospice in 1917.

Remarkably, and perhaps giving Reynauld the last word from beyond the grave, the Lumière brothers declared “the cinema is an invention without any future”, which probably ranks right up there alongside “Can’t act, can’t sing. Can dance a little” (Sinatra) and “too ugly to become famous” (The Rolling Stones) with the most ill-advised reverse predictions ever made. The Lumières instead marketed their invention as a tool for photography, not film, and so are not considered, despite making the first real strides in the field of animation, to be its forebears, despite being credited with having invented the technology.



Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874-1961)

From what I can make out, the next milestone on the road to animation comes from the UK, from a guy called Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, the son of a photographer who created what is generally accepted as “the world’s first stop-motion film”. It was commissioned by Bryant and May, one of the biggest manufacturers of matches at the time, in response to an appeal to help the soldiers in the Boer War, who were struggling from a shortage of matches. You might imagine, far from home and fighting surely disease and heatstroke as well as an implacable enemy that the last thing on the minds of the soldiers was smoking, but when has that ever stopped a company getting what it wanted?

Using what would become a well-used method of filming one frame, moving the model slightly, filming again, moving it again etc, Melbourne-Cooper was able to make it seem as if the matches were animated, as two sticks figure made of them spelled out the appeal on a black wall. This all took place in 1899.

Now, let’s be clear and honest here. The voiceover on this video proudly claims “The oldest existing animated film in the world is British.” But no, it isn’t. Because as we’ve seen from our piece on our friend Charles-Emile Reynaud, a version of his Pauvre Pierrot is still around, albeit in a restored form, and that predates “Matches Appeal” by a good seven years. But I suppose if Melbourne-Cooper’s one, being shot, obviously, in black and white, has survived without being restored or altered for over a hundred years, then maybe she has a point. Whatever the case, it’s an impressive little bit, both of animation and of advertising, pulling at the heart (and purse) strings of the viewer, both by dint of their patriotic fervour for “the boys abroad” and by the cuteness of the little stick figures. Well, I don’t think they’re cute but I bet many who watched that film did, and donated their guinea accordingly.

By 1908 Melbourne-Cooper had progressed in leaps and bounds (for the time) and had moved on to be able to shoot a live-action movie with stop-motion (or, as it was called at the time, frame-by-frame) animation in the fantasy short film “Dreams of Toyland”. In the movie, a woman takes her son to a toyshop, where a distinctly sinister-looking shopkeeper sells her some toys. In quite a clever move, one of the toys she buys, a large omnibus, has an advertisement on it proclaiming the title of the film. That’s all very well and good as far as it goes, but nothing terribly innovative. Yet.

It’s when the child goes to bed that things start to get interesting. Suddenly the scene zooms in, and we see the toys all arranged as if they’re in their own little city. People cross roads while horses and carts move along them and that big omnibus makes its slow way down the thoroughfare. One of the soft toys (think it might be a golliwog - wouldn’t be allowed these days!) - even drives the omnibus while other toys, including a white teddy bear, climb on board. However in helping I think a monkey on to the bus the bear overbalances and falls off the bus. Oh dear! But he’s not hurt (when ever is anyone in cartoons or animation, or when does it ever matter?) in fact he starts fighting with.. yes I’m sure that’s a golliwog. So you have a white bear fighting a toy notoriously recognised as a black person. Whether innocently or no, whether making a political/racial statement or just completely coincidentally, you have perhaps the first filmed occurrence of a race fight on screen!

Now it looks like the golliwog is stealing some drunk’s bag and running off, and then being tackled by a monkey. Are they fighting or dancing? If the former, there’s a very violent subtext to this film! Now a guy on stilts is joining in and - no, they’re all dancing now. Definitely dancing. And now they’ve been run over by the omnibus! Oh look! Here’s that troublesome white bear back, and he’s riding a train. And he’s, um, ramming a monkey in the arse with it. Now the monkey is on a horse chasing the bear and here comes the omnibus again and - it’s crashed into the bear, running him over and blowing up. Man, such violence and such a dark ending!

Amazing stuff, and if you’re totally into looking for subtexts like me, there’s racial violence, latent homosexual activity, just normal violence and road rage! Crazy. And all before World War I. Arthur Cooper-Melbourne was not just an animator, but made plenty of live-action films (as this one shows) and in fact opened two studios, one of which burned down, but that pesky war interrupted his schedule and though he made some animated advertisments for cinemas after the war, opening an ad agency, he retired in 1940 and died in 1961.


Walter Robert Booth (1869-1938) and Robert William Paul (1869-1943)

Interesting point above: these two men appear to have been born in the same year and died a mere five years apart, Paul slightly outlasting Booth. A cartoonist and conjurer, Booth teamed up with Paul, an inventor and showman, and together they produced a number of animated films, beginning with “Upside Down, or The Human Flies” in which Booth simply turned the camera upside-down to make it appear as if his subjects were on the ceiling. A simple trick, but back then it probably stumped audiences, and being a magician at heart, he probably played up to the idea that this was a form of magic.

It’s cleverly done, and let’s be honest: it’s actually more realistic and believable than Batman and Robin, some sixty years later, apparently walking up a wall! You know how this trick is done, yet in some ways you kind of forget that, and it looks very impressive. I’m not looking through the whole thing - it runs for over twelve minutes, and I’ve work to do - but I do see about halfway through a magician puts a woman in a sort of wardrobe and when he opens the door, first she’s gone, then she’s in a sort of Iron maiden thing, then she’s a skeleton, then she’s a man - very clever indeed. Ah, I see. Looking further I see whoever created this video has in fact joined that film and another called “The Haunted Curiosity Shop”, so that explains why it’s so long and why there was no mention of this cabinet trick in the piece about “The Human Flies”. Worth watching for both.

“Marley’s Ghost”, shown above, from 1901, was a Paul product, and though it’s essentially a movie, it does use clever early animation techniques, such as superimposing Marley’s ghostly face on Scrooge’s door, and also scenes from the miser’s childhood on a black curtain over his bed. Another of his, this time from five years later, shows a car driving up the wall of a building to escape a pursuing policeman, then fly across the sky, up into the clouds (along which it drives as if they were hills) and onto the moon (face and all) then on to Saturn, where it literally drives around the gas giant’s rings, falling off and plunging back to earth, where it smashes through the roof of the courthouse, from which it is pursued by the law until, caught, the driver has the car turn into a horse and cart, and the cops let it go. Whereupon, as it drives away, it turns back into a car.

Booth is probably best known, if at all, for his “scaremongering” animation trilogy, “The Airship Destroyer” (1909), “The Aerial Submarine” (1910) and “The Aerial Anarchists” (1911), the last of which predicted what might happen should terrorists gain control of aircraft, perhaps both a prophecy about the coming war and also a look almost a century into the future where the numbers 911 would take on a whole different, horrible and long-lasting meaning, and would in fact prove his “theory”.

The middle one is the only one I could track down, and again it’s more a film than a proper animation, but it does use clever techniques that would be used again and again in cartoons, such as the fake ocean seen through the portholes of the submarine by the captives as they travel beneath the water, complete with animated fish, the animation of a torpedo and an explosion as the sub torpedoes an ocean liner and a rather clever if crude flight as the sub leaves the sea and flies into the air. Interestingly too, it shows the development of photographic plates in the film, possibly (though I can’t confirm) the first time this process was captured on film.

I also remark on the fact here that the leader of the pirates, from what I can see, appears to be a woman. Considering this was 1910 and women’s suffrage was still a decade away, this is either a very bold move on Booth’s part, making a telling statement, or I guess could also be viewed as the belief that women on board ship are always bad luck. She must be the captain though, because as everyone else, including the hostages, scramble clear and run when the submarine crashes to earth, she folds her arms, remains in the hatchway and waits till the thing explodes, literally going down with her vessel.

Like many early animators and film-makers, Booth gave it all up in 1915 and got into the advertising business, where he invented a method called “Flashing Film Ads: unique colour effects in light and movement.” Paul had already moved on to other things by 1910, five years previous, but is remembered fondly by animators, and when you look at the work he put out that’s not at all surprising. But he had many irons in the fire, and neither cinematography nor animation were the ones he wanted to handle.

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James Stuart Blackton (1875-1941)

Another Englishman who can be truly said to be one of the godfathers of animation, Blackton produced most of his work in the USA, so may erroneously sometimes be considered an American animator, but he was born in Sheffield in England. He worked with Thomas Edison and set up the American Vitagraph Company, one of the first motion picture companies in America. Eventually the company was bought out by Warner Bros. Blackton produced some animated films that are recognised today as the finest examples of clever stop-motion film, including “The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) in which Blackton draws a picture of a fat man and then beside him a bottle and a glass. He then takes the glass and bottle from the canvas and drinks the beer, later also drawing a top hat on the man which he takes and wears. The expression of the drawing changes too. It’s really quite remarkable for the time.

His other major stop-motion films (not strictly animation but using it in some scenes) are “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906) and “The Haunted Hotel” (1907), both of which illustrate the technique well, especially the latter, which allows the creation of ghosts on the screen. “Humorous Phases” shows two faces, one man one woman, reacting to each other, They smile, wink, and when the man blows cigar smoke at the woman and obscures her completely (just before she makes a disapproving frown) Blackton erases them both and creates a new, full-figure sketch of man who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain rotund director of suspense films! Good evening…

“Haunted Hotel” seems to show ghosts writhing in the smoke from the chimney as the short opens, then the house and a tree outside it both animate, the windows and doors of the former becoming a face. Inside the hotel, objects move, confusing and annoying the weary traveller, and then in an action which surely Disney must have robbed for Fantasia twenty years later, bread cuts itself and coffee pours itself out and then a sheet runs comes out of the milk jug and dances around. The animation is exceptionally smooth and seamless for the era we’re talking about here, and it’s no wonder all of these early films are now in the Library of Congress, preserved for future generations.



So, far from Uncle Walt or even already-discussed and rightly celebrated Winsor McCay being the father of animation, it seems the only ones to come close to deserving that title were in fact English. Still, everything the abovementioned created was either what were known as “lightning sketches” (where the hand of the artist is shown sketching out a figure which is then animated by various cinematographic effects) or stop-motion films, both of which can certainly be regarded as forms of animation, but don’t really tie in with what cartoons and animated films would eventually turn out to be, ie manipulation of frames of drawn characters.

Over the English Channel, the film craze had already been underway of course, with Reynauld and the Lumiere brothers, but nobody had really made the leap into true animation. It was in fact another Frenchman, decoding the ideas and methods of an Englishman, who would perhaps unlock the door that led to one of the world’s first true animated films.

Émile Cohl (1857-1938)
Cohl was intrigued by the process used to animate the dinner things in James Blackton’s “The Haunted Hotel”, and set about working it out for himself. Once he had, he used that process to produce his own animated feature, which debuted in 1909. “Fantasmagorie” featured a clown who interacts with various other people and objects. The motion is fluid, and when a woman sits in front of him with a large hat with many feathers, blocking his view, he delights in taking the feathers from her hat one by one and disposing of them. But the film is very stream-of-consciousness, as figures become other figures, objects metamorphose and really there’s no real sense or logic to the thing, unlike just about every other animated feature prior to its creation. At one point, the animator (Cohl) seems to actually reach into the drawing and pick up the character.

This was totally different to anything that had gone before. Up to now, any animated feature, no matter how weird, had a strange sense of logic running through it. Paul’s car flew in “The ? Motorist”, yes, but it still followed some basic rules of logic, driving around the rings of Saturn, using the clouds as if they were hills. Despite the need to suspend disbelief, this and other animations still kept their feet, metaphorically speaking, rooted on the ground. Weird and unexpected things happened, yes, but you understand what was going on. In “Fantasmagorie”, as the title implies, everything is a fantasy and nothing is, or needs to be, explained.

This is perhaps the first template for the true cartoon, where things just happened, and no laws of physics applied. A wall could fall on a character, squashing him flat, but he would be up and running about in the next scene. People could fall from heights and leave with nothing more than perhaps concertinaed up legs (which would be staightened out next time) and characters could be shown dying, but still remain alive. In cartoons, everything would go, nothing would be too nonsensical or fantastic or unbelievable. Everything was possible, everything was doable, and there was no such word as can’t.

Three years later, Cohl animated “The Newlyweds”, a comic strip that had appeared in “New York World” , which I believe makes him the first to bring characters who had appeared in a newspaper strip to life, as it were, through the medium of animation. Only one example of this long-running series has survived time’s passage. You can see it below, but be warned: even restored, it’s still pretty poor quality.

It’s believed that later animator Winsor McCay took some influences and perhaps even paid homage to Cohl in his films, particularly “Little Nemo”, created a year later in 1910. Another ground-breaking film by Cohl introduced colour (I can’t confirm if this was the first time or not that colour was used in an animated film - other than coloured paper, which was of course in use long before this - but I haven’t read of any other instances of it) to allow him to animate coloured blank canvasses in the four-minute live-action film “The Neo-Impressionistic Painter”, where a prospective client is duped into thinking that blank slates are works of art, his imagination filling in the details which Cohl draws and animates.


George Méliès (1861-1938)

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking it, aren’t you? You’re right: he died the very same year as Emile Cohl, mere hours later in fact. Seems the history of animation is full of such crazy little coincidences. But who does not know this name? If you don’t actually know his name, you definitely know, or have seen clips of, what was believed to be the world’s first ever science-fiction film, “A Trip to the Moon”, based on fellow Frenchman’s classic novels “From the Earth to the Moon” and “Around the Moon”. Having had his interest in cinema fired by witnessing the demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ new invention in 1895, he to buy one but was turned down. However two years later their camera and others were readily on sale and he was able to buy one that suited his needs.

One of his earliest films used the effect of multiple exposure to allow him play seven characters at once in the 1900 short, “One Man Band”, while “The Vanishing Lady”, even earlier (1896) shows him making a woman disappear, come back as a skeleton and finally as herself. All of these effects of course are more trick film techniques, and perhaps are not, or should not, be considered true animation, but it’s hard to discover where the line between effects and animations lies, and so I’ve made a sort of arbitrary decision to include examples of anyone who used any sort of effect in their work that either made the film more than it could be with normal camera work, or that mimicked or perhaps even later inspired animation techniques, such as Cohl’s “The Haunted Hotel”.

Méliès also seems to be the first (probably not the only but certainly the first) film maker I can see who made a satirical religious film, in his “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1898) in which a monk worshipping at the foot of the cross is plagued by women who appear out of nowhere and attempt to seduce him, one actually taking the place of Christ on the cross. Surely controversial for the time, and in Catholic France, surely very courageous.

Without question though, his most famous and enduring film is the aforementioned “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) which has been generally accepted as the world’s first science-fiction film. I think everyone recognises the famous shot of the moon, a face looking none too pleased as the rocket carrying the space pioneers lands in its eye.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018