Émile Cohl, Fantasmagorie, 1908

Click here to see the animation:

Technological innovation and conceptual invention are not always in synch, and thus the question of which is the driver of the other remains unresolvable. The astonishingly original animated film, Fantasmagorie, created by French artist Émile Cohn in 1908, has graphic dimensions to it that aren’t within a strict lineage of precedents or determined simply by sequencing still images to create an illusion of motion.[1] The conceptual leaps in the film are not just the result of technical developments.

Film animation, understandably, is associated with movement. The image of Winsor McKay’s Gertie the dinosaur, waving her long graceful neck with charming grace, drinking the entire lake at her feet, and walking through a painted background landscape comes immediately to mind. Drawn in 1914 by the extremely gifted graphic artist, the canonical cartoon has its precedents in the 19^th century proliferation of mechanical devices with intriguing names and equally engaging effects. The 1825 “thaumatrope” whose Greek name translates to something like “wonder turner” held a two-sided disk with two images that seemed to unite when the object spun.[2] As Adí Avram notes, an example was a bird and birdcage, each on opposite sides of the sheet. When rapidly twirled, the bird appeared to be in the cage. Within a few years, the Phenakistoscope and Zoetrope were invented in 1832 and 1833/34 respectively, both mechanical devices for rapid viewing of sequential images.

The desire to see images move had of course been satisfied by displays of puppets and silhouetted shadows in dramatic works in a variety of cultures, but those were “real time” motions, not simulations of movement produced by the manipulation of static images. The use of photographic methods to capture movement, break it into discrete units for analysis and study, is famously embodied in the work of Edweard Muybridge, who also invented the Zoopraxiscipe in 1879 to display the movement of animals. The famous “Horse in Motion” study commissioned by Leland Stanford in 1878 was a series of individual images, each on a distinct photographic plate. By contrast, when Etienne-Jules Marey produced motion studies in the 1890s, he created multiple exposures on a single plate. His results are dynamic in a way that seems to anticipate Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase and the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla’s work of the same year, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. The paintings are fantastic works, conceptually as well as visually adventurous, cutting new ground in the effort to understand and present the paradox of capturing action in a static medium.

But the imagination of one early animator has an altogether different and mind-boggling aspect to it. Émile Cohl is credited with creating one of the first animated films in 1908, several years before Winsor McKay and others (but after Thomas Edison). Not only is it distinct from their work, but it is graphically original in striking ways. McKay, and also the artists who produced the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, in 1928, created a graphic, hand-drawn, imitation of movement as it appears in film–as sequential frames. This required certain calculations of how many drawings were required to create smooth transitions across a narrative arc. But Cohl does something else entirely.

Cohl used his art of animation for morphing rather than simply for motion. Motion appears in Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, but it is the transformative imagination of graphics that produce conceptual frame jumps that is so remarkable. In the language of renowned theorist/critic of comics and graphic novels, Scott McCloud, this is a non-sequitor, a category McCloud uses to designate a shift that is mind-bending.[3] While the other frame-to-frame transitions in his useful list include moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, and aspect-to-aspect, the non-sequitur introduces cognitive disorientation. (McCloud 71-71) The other changes are all within an established and ongoing narrative, but the non-sequitur is the moment at which you realize that the character dreaming of a butterfly is actually a person dreaming of being a butterfly who is dreaming of being painted on a backdrop by a drunken sailor… you get the point.

What makes Cohl’s animation so striking is the way that almost every sequence involves making what you see into something else. This happens fast, no doubt in part because the tedium of creating intermediate alterations from one sketch to another became boring, but also because the speed reinforces the surprise.

Screenshot from Fantasmagorie.

The film begins with the image of the artist’s hand drawing a white line, like chalk on a black board. No sooner is the line complete than angled appendages appear, a circle between them, the top of what becomes a figure as the scale shifts. A clown-like form hangs suspended for part of a second then the arms straighten and lift the line as if it were the curtain of another window. Then the bar descends, becomes a box, a room with a man in it with an umbrella while the clown figure walks away. The new figure turns to profile, round as a wheel—but wait, it’s a seat, we’re in a theater and a woman wearing a hat with giant features sits down and blocks the man’s view. This goes on, and each (very) short sequence is replaced by another unexpected event as figures appear suddenly, drawn with a minimum of means. A line becomes a hook that catches a hat and swings back into a bundle that opens into a man with a sword and explodes while the clown man returns, loses his head, puts it back on and his opponent bends over head becoming a cork in a champagne bottle.

Though lively and comic, the details are less significant than the action of the graphic in which not only are shapes changing and things turning into other things, but the frame of reference is constantly altering as well. No backgrounds are drawn, no scenes are set, the iconography of these shifting signs suffices to signal the telegraphing of semiotic switcheroo games in a sleight of sight that plays at every second with our expectations.

Where did this come from? From what imaginary pool of doodling energy did the artist draw (literally and figuratively) this approach to motion as morphing? How did he conceive of movement as an excuse to be a prestidigitator rather than a storyteller?

By contrast, several of the other earliest animation techniques built on the projection techniques that Charles-Émile Reynaud employed in his “luminous pantomimes”—essentially overlays of figures painted on transparent substrate placed on a sumptuous background. Close in aesthetic sensibility to other magic lantern projections, Reynaud’s elegant productions, as shown in the beginning of Pauvre Pierrot (1892), required two reels of sprocketed film manipulated simultaneously to merge with each other.[4] Stop-motion, in which a film camera was paused to make a change in the set, figures, or costumes, was exploited to great effect by the Méliès brothers beginning in 1896. Georges Méliès’s masterwork in the genre, Le Voyage dans La Lune, (1902), remains comically engaging, its charm undiminished. Its ambitious combination of photographic, painted, and manipulated media is striking, but the structure of the images and filming follows the codes of a proscenium stage, in keeping with the dominant entertainment of the time.[5] Thomas Edison made a short animation, The Enchanted Drawing, in 1900 that played with representation and reality in a piece where an artist interacts with their drawing, stealing its wine, hat, and cigar only to return them to the appreciative face.[6]

Winsor McKay was good at showcasing his artistic abilities, filming his exceptionally skilled hand in speeded-up motion as he produced compelling characters in pen and ink. McKay’s earliest animations were Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).[7] These both integrate photographic scenes of the artist making a bet with friends about his ability to make an image move. Then he documents his production of the thousands of drawings necessary to produce the minute or two of animation. (At twenty-four frames a second, 2400 drawings would be required to create a minute and forty seconds of film.) The contrast of photographic and drawn imagery calls attention to the new art form, emphasizing its novelty and the surprise it produces in his social group. The men, elegantly dressed and daring each other to a wager, place the project in the milieu of Golden Age New York. Meanwhile McKay is seen drawing at a desk surrounded by barrels of ink and palettes of paper, 2ith white marble (or plaster) busts of famous figures on his shelves.

McKay’s Nemo moves, stretches, twirls over and his Gertie does too, but the animation is a storyboard, a sequential cartoon, more conventional than McKay’s mind-stretching depictions of the dreams little Nemo has regularly in his proto-surrealist travels in Slumberland. Likewise, the earliest Mickey Mouse appearance in the 1928 Disney production of Steamboat Willie and subsequent 1929 films Barn Dance and Plane Crazy are clever, quick, and comic, but avoid the realm of dreams and certainly do not play with cognitive frame jumps.[8] All are filled with visual puns, games of surprise as when sheet music being consumed by a goat drops its notes onto the deck of the boat. But even when Mickey turns over a nursing sow to play on her teats (!), or strikes a tune on a hippo’s teeth, the reference frames do not shift. We are in the same scene, same scale, same narrative timeline throughout.

Thus the incredible leap of conceptual imagination in Fantasmagorie puts it into a different category. Cohl (born Courtet) was employed in the studio of a renowned French caricaturist, André Gill, and developed his graphic skills by producing the backgrounds for that artist’s works. More biographical detail on Cohl is readily accessed in the Wiki article about him, but one interesting point of information is that in keeping with the spirit of the final decades of the 19^th century, he was part of one artistic movement, The Hydropathes, and then another named The Incoherents.[9] The latter adopted the slogan “Gaity is properly French, so let’s be French.” Their focus? Absurdism, and an interest in the drawings of children, as well as dreams. All of this is vividly apparent in Fantasmagorie, fifteen years before these ideas found high profile expression in the work of the Surrealists.

The curious point that Cohl put the backgrounds into his Gill’s work stands in stark contrast to the fact that the characters in Fantasmagorie are all figures without a ground. This frees them, and us. The frames they invoke are conceptual, not literal, and the fluidity with which Cohl invokes them one after another is truly remarkable. Cohl’s is a work of graphic imagination rather than textual invention or illustration.

---

[1] Émile Cohl, Fantasmagorie, 1908. View on YouTube.

[2] Adí Avram, Linearity blog. July 2022. https://www.linearity.io/blog/early-animation-devices/

[3] Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, https://archive.org/details/understanding-comics/page/72/mode/2up

[4] Emile Reynaud, Pauvre Pierrot, 1892.

[5] George Méilès, 1902, The Trip to the Moon, 1902.

[6] Thomas A. Edison, The Enchanted Drawing, 1900. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Drawing

[7] Winsor McKay, Little Nemo, 1911.

and Gertie the Dinosaur,

[8] Steamboat Willie, A Walt Disney Comic, 1928.

[9] Émile Cohl, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cohl