First animated film

Defining the first animated film is not easy. This is because from time to time there are new discoveries in archives, film libraries or private collections that verify textbook knowledge. The least is known about the first decade of cinema’s existence, it also causes the most controversy. To understand it, one must realize how the film industry functioned a hundred years ago. At least until the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, there was no system for renting and cataloging films. Rarely did anyone care about the tape, which was sold by the meter like cloth. No one restored damaged negatives. Minute films did not have a long expiration date, and on top of that, many of them existed in a few copies at most. Wars and fires completed the job.

The-Horse-in-Motion

The mess also involves titles and authorship. In order to deceive viewers and cinema owners, middlemen and producers sold the same films several times each, only that under a changed title. Often, instead of the director’s name, the name of the studio owner was placed on the initial board, or any information important to modern historians was omitted altogether. It happened that touring cinemas, out of frugality, showed one reel of a work consisting of two or more acts. Distribution of incomplete films is not the last cause of numerous misunderstandings. One should still remember piracy, a practice rampant due to loopholes in copyright law: the illegal copying of negatives, the theft of plot and narrative ideas, as well as faithful imitations of popular titles.

The question, “Who came first?” never ceases to intrigue. After all, many filmmakers have gained recognition due to their artistic achievements, others simply because they were ahead of the competition. Knowing the chronology of events in the pioneering years helps clarify many important facts.

The origins of puppet film

The first animated film, not just a puppet film, was Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s Matches Appeal from 1899. The film consists of one minute shot: matches come out of a box (this sequence is lost) and form into two characters and a ladder. One of the characters writes an appeal to the audience on the wall:

[Appeal. By paying one guinea, Bryant & May will send a box with a box of matches for each member of the battalion in response to the demand. Inside the box will be the name of the donor. PS Our soldiers need them].

The context is completely illegible today, so it needs clarification. In 1899 in South Africa, Dutch expatriates (Boers) rose up – for the second time, anyway – against the British authorities, who, not wanting to lose their rich gold and diamond deposits, sent their troops and bloodily suppressed the uprising. Reportedly, the British military suffered from a shortage of supplies, vexed, among other things, by the lack of matches, which were then a commodity perhaps not a luxury, but quite expensive, used by soldiers mainly for lighting tobacco. Civilian organizations on the Island put out an appeal to the public to buy matches. Thanks to them, soldiers were able to enjoy the taste of a pipe, perhaps the last pastime on unfriendly African soil.

Melbourne-Cooper, however, is not the only contender for the title of father of animation. The date of the first animated film was tried to push back to 1898 by Albert Edward Smith, an associate of James Stuart Blackton.

Smith wrote in his memoirs: “The Vitagraph studio made the first stop-motion picture [stop-motion picture] based film in America, The Humpty Dumpty Circus. I used a set of wooden circus performers and animals, belonging to my daughter, whose movable members allowed them to be placed in balanced positions. This was a tedious process, as movement could only be achieved by photographing each position change separately. I suggested that this production process be patented, but Blackton thought it was irrelevant. There were, of course, more contenders for this title. This does not mean, however, that the filmmakers were incapable of accepting the fact that someone else had sooner come up with the idea of using a camera to bring a doll or drawing to life. It’s just that experiments with time-lapse photography were being conducted in parallel in many parts of the world. The filmmaker from Russia did not know what his colleague in Argentina or the British Isles was doing.

The origins of cartoon film

As many as three short films:

• James Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, 1906
• Émile Cohl’s Phantasmagoria from 1908
• and Little Nemo (Little Nemo) by Winsor McCay from 1911.

… pretend to be the first cartoon. They are similar both in content, the technique used and the convention adopted. They are all adaptations of a stage play popular at the end of the 19th century, known in England as lightning sketches (“instant, made-up sketches”), which in America was called talking chalks or chalk talks (“talking chalk”).

Funny Faces

All of the precursor cartoon films have in common a delight in the movement of something artificial and inorganic. Blackton was the first to use two drawings that differed in phase of movement, and then assembled a film from four animated sequences into a single episode.

Émile Cohl created a character that gave order to the fanciful transformations (Phantasmagoria is made up of about 13 sequences-images). Winsor McCay, on the other hand, enriched the visuals – added color and detail – exposed the characters, and above all, used two ideas that would revolutionize cartooning in the future – humorous self-talk (Nemo draws another character) and the use of entire motion sequences several times.