Emile Cohl (1857) was French cartoonist and is known as "The Father of the Animated Cartoon”. He is also known to have brought with him stop motion to America.
Fantasmagorie (1908) is ‘considered the first fully animated film ever made’ wiki. It spans two minutes and is made up of 700 drawings. The word Fantasmagorie is defined as “a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined.” [indingdulcinea.com.] The entire animation is a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ [findingdulcinea.com]. It seems as though Cohl was experimenting with what he could do within animation. His technique was to trace each drawing based on the previous one creating a continuous flow and movement. Although the film is a hectic and eager exploration of the possibilities of a new world discovered, at the time the footage was astounding if not frightening.
‘The puppets nightmare’. Emile Cohl plays and experiments with the physics of his characters by completely flipping upside down and abstracting physics. He stretches and squashes the characters, changes their anatomy, and even turns them into inanimate objects. His transitions between shots are very aesthetically clever, for instance, at some point he turns a man into a ladder. His lines and flow are quite genius and there is an abstract and random, slapstick humour to his work.
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