The Four Color Media Monitor

The Times of India has some history of Fantasmagorie, the oldest known cartoon in the medium, dating back as far as 1908:

With no narrative sequence and objects magically morphing to something completely different, Fantasmagorie was the first animated feature film of its kind. The title is a reference to ‘fantasmograph’, a 19th century ‘magic lantern’ that projected ghostly images onto walls. This silent film by Emile Cohl is an example of hand drawn animation.

It is believed to be a tribute to the brief but significant French Incoherent art movement. The Incoherents believed that art is subjective and hence it should never be restricted to the age-old traditions and norms, rather it should break those boundaries to accommodate newer kinds of media too. Art should not just be for the pleasure of a few chosen intellectuals, who decide what is supposed to be considered art.

The film appears to be created on a blackboard, but it actually was drawn on a paper. Cohl made a total of 700 drawings on a white paper, each almost similar to the last with just minor alterations. They were then shot on a negative film so as to give it an illusion that white lines were running on a black background. It was a hard task, to draw 700 different sequences and make them appear that they are actually moving. The animation is about a mysterious puppet, which is shown to be brought to life by someone hand drawing it in the first frame of the film.

And this is how animation as we know it found its origins. Today, there's only so much that could be prepared on computers, as opposed to how frames-per-second was the approach in the early days of animated illustration.

Labels: animation, history