100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Fantasmagorie / Emile Cohl
France /1908
This might not look like much now, but what it is, is the birth of the cartoon.
Although animation is usually a collaborative process, in day-to-day practice the hours are spent in solitary meditation and concentration, which doesn’t always breed outgoing characters. The animator often works away in the back room single-mindedly pursuing his vision and so to achieve anything has to have someone taking care of business, his producer, gathering money, support and opportunity and clearing the path of obstacles (and in cases like Fritz the cat animator Otto Mesmer and his producer Pat Sullivan, (allegedly) stealing all the glory). Often though, the greatest names in animation history however have been at varying levels both artists and charismatic figures, able to persuade, influence and mobilise others in order to move things forward and get things done, Walt Disney, John Halas, Richard Williams and John Lasseter spring to mind.
Animation has also thrown up a handful of great genuinely independent and maverick characters who were talented artists, determined and persuasive characters AND unique enough to have pulled off the near impossible trick of remaining individualists outside the mainstream but still managing to reach audiences and survive financially; Len Lye, Ralph Bakshi and Bill Plympton spring to mind, and Emile Cohl was perhaps the first blueprint for this type of animator.
Cohl was born Emile Courtet in Paris in 1857, first achieving fame (and notoriety), as a Parisian bohemian, a caricaturist who at one point was jailed for a piece of work that was particularly offensive to the government, and as a member of a loose art movement called ‘The Incoherents’, who believed in the power of the ridiculous and the ludicrous.
Challenging convention and closed thinking, The Incoherents subverted the art establishment by holding art exhibitions of drawings by people who couldn’t draw and of sculpture made of food, and were precursors of the dada and surrealist movements and conceptual art. Cohl took this attitude into the new medium of animation and in doing so created a template for cartoons to come. Cohl’s characters stretched, came apart, transformed into objects and animals and then afterwards recovered as if nothing had happened. The impossible was not only possible, but certain to happen.
The film’s title refers to the Fantasmograph, one of the nineteenth-century variants of the “magic lantern.” It contains over 700 drawings (each double exposed, or shot on “doubles” as animators call it), runs for nearly two minutes, and could be said to be the world’s first fully-animated film. Considering its short length, Fantasmagorie contains an impressive number of wild events, each joyously and spontaneously created by Cohl in his stream of consciousness, bohemian style as he traced over his own drawings, changing details frame by frame, and working out the timing as he went along.
Audiences were delirious with the mad chaos before them on the screen. Cohl understood perfectly the whole point of cartoons, that its appeal is that of a universe where anything can happen and nothing is as expected. In demonstrating this he laid the anarchic path for early Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, UPA and every other future creator of this new form of popular mass-market surrealism, before the idea of realism in animation spoiled the fun by making cartoons respectable.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!