On this Day: Émile Cohl Releases the First Full-Length Animated Film, 'Fantasmagorie'

Animation predated Émile Cohl’s “Fantasmagorie” by decades, in the form of flipbooks and other primitive techniques. Some earlier films even included drawn or stop-motion animation, but Cohl was the first to produce a fully animated film.

Cohl began working on “Fantasmagorie” in February of 1908, and completed it weeks later. The animation consisted of 700 drawings that were filmed as black lines on white paper; the film’s negatives were then reversed to make the image resemble a chalkboard with white lines on a black background. Cohl would place a drawing on a lightbox, photograph it, and then slightly change it and photograph it again; “this meant that the pictures did not jitter and the plot was spontaneous.”

The French word fantasmagorie (in English, phantasmagoria) is defined as “a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined.” This is a fitting title for Cohl’s work, a succession of rapidly shifting images and shapes. The film is “a hectic jumble of jumping about, fishing, sword-fighting, canons, flowers, milk bottles, elephants turning into houses and, for the grand finale, a character departing into the left-hand side of the screen on a horse.” Although lacking a coherent storyline, the film was extremely influential for its creativity and energy, demonstrating the potential that animation could yield to a creative mind. Essentially, Cohl paved the way for future greats like Max and Dave Fleischer, Walt Disney and Chuck Jones.

Émile Cohl was born on Jan. 4, 1857. His father was a rubber salesman and his mother, a linen seamstress. As a child, he attended the Institut Vaudron, a boarding school where he began developing his artistic talents. In 1878, Cohl was offered a job as the assistant to the most famous caricaturist of his time, Andre Gill. He worked as a writer and illustrator for many years. In 1907, the 50-year-old Cohl was hired as a film scenarist for the studio Gaumont. After the success of the partially animated 1907 film “The Haunted Hotel,” studios rushed to produce similar works, a trend that led to the creation of “Fantasmagorie.” Afterward, Cohl produced several other animated films, until his death in 1938.

As new animation techniques were developed, the cartoon exploded in popularity. The invention of the animation cel, “a sheet of transparent celluloid that is placed on top of a background drawing,” allowed artists to redraw only the portions of an image that moved. Gradually, cartoons added sound and color, and became more life-like, cheaper and easier to create. Legendary animator Walt Disney was responsible for many innovations in the animation process.

In the 1990s, a new trend in computer-generated, or CG, animation began to emerge. Thanks to CG animation, “animation is now an astonishing universe in which textures are photo-realistic, light and shadow are flawless, crowds and armies can be almost infinite and virtual cameras go anywhere, anyhow in 3D environments.” Since Pixar’s 1995 release of “Toy Story,” dozens of movies have followed in its animated footsteps.