1906 – This Film Is 100 Years Old

Fantasmagorie, Le cauchemar de Fantoche (The Puppet’s Nightmare) and Un drame chez les Fantoches (The Puppet’s Drama) are three early animated films, all directed by the groundbreaking Emile Cohl, a French artist and animator who was once a member of the Incoherents art movement, an excellently named precursor of the Surrealists.

Both Fantasmagorie (pictured above) and Le cauchemar de Fantoche (pictured below) are essentially a constant stream of visual improvisations, as the simple stick figures and line drawings transform and morph unpredictably through a series of surrealist imagery and interactions for a couple of minutes. They’re utterly wonderful.

That same year, Emile Cohl followed these up with Un drame chez les fantoches, a slightly more complex cartoon, in terms of plot, at least, in that it actually has a story. Unfortunately, it loses something in terms of the sheer energy and imagination of his first two, although it still has a couple of nice sequences in it, too (like the wonderful snake, shown below, which looks fairly like the sort of creature I like to draw).

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Notes

1. I watched all of these on youtube – Fantasmagorie here, Le cauchemar de Fantoche here, and Un drame chez les fantoches here.

2. Although Fantasmagorie is often said to be the first fully animated film, I’m pretty sure the “fully animated” distinction is added only so everyone can talk about this rather than the deadeningly awful Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces, which was directed a couple of years earlier by J. Stuart Blackton.

3. And which Fantasmagorie is clearly inspired by.

4. It’s strange how many early cartoons had to have a bit showing the illustrators hands drawing the first image at the start.

5. Presumably so you understood it was a cartoon and not some sort of dream come to life.

6. Fantasmagorie and Le cauchemar de Fantoche also remind me a lot of Dipdap, which I really love.

7. I wish I was an Incoherent.

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Film Information

Title: Fantasmagorie
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 2 minutes

Title: Le cauchemar de Fantoche
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 2 minutes

Title: Un drame chez les fantoches
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 3 minutes

Title: Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces
Director: J. Stuart Blackton
Year: 1906
Duration: 3 minutes

The “?” Motorist is a pretty wonderful 3-minute long comedy sketch made in 1906 by WR Booth, an early pioneer in so-called “trick” films, where camera tricks and special effects were used to create breathtaking, impossible, visuals.

The “?” Motorist is a delight. It’s quick, funny, perfectly paced, with a strangely beautiful space interlude and a great final joke. The only downside is that it has a frightening moon with a terrifying face, as was the style at the time.

Then, five years later, he decided to make it again, but this time with a robot driving the car.

The Automatic Motorist, despite the robot, is unfortunately worse in almost every way. In typical reboot style, there’s more stuff, and almost all of it worse, so this is longer, slower, with worse jokes, and any number of shots that go on too long.

There is a, though, really lovely scene where they drive along the bottom of a lake and look at all the delightful newts swimming around, which I found really beautiful.

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Notes

1. I watched both of these on the BFI player – The “?” Motorist; The Automatic Motorist
2. Neither of those versions have music, but you can probably find versions with a score on youtube.
3. And many thanks to Vom Vorton for telling me to watch The “?” Motorist, as it was excellent.

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Film Information

Title: The “?” Motorist
Director: WR Booth
Year: 1906
Runtime: 3 minutes

Title: The Automatic Motorist
Director: WR Booth
Year: 1911
Runtime: 6 minutes