Eventually, some of the old ideas were combined with the new motion picture technology. In 1906, an American cartoonist named James Stuart Blackton created a short film entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. His process was simple: he drew some faces on a blackboard with chalk, photographed them, changed them slightly, photographed them again, and so on. When the film played, the faces appeared to come alive; in the film, the face of a woman blows smoke into the face of a man. Most film historians consider this to actually be the first animated cartoon. Winsor McCay knew James Stuart Blackton, and he almost certainly saw Blackton’s film, although he never mentioned it.
The next year, Blackton made another film, The Haunted Hotel. Best described as a “trick film,” it used stop-motion photography to make random household objects appear to move on their own—a teapot pouring itself, a knife floating across a room to cut a loaf of bread. The film eventually made its way to France, where it was seen by Émile Cohl, a cartoonist who had once worked as a magician in Paris. After seeing Blackton’s film, but before McCay would make Little Nemo, Cohl decided that he also wanted to make animated cartoons.
Émile Cohl got upset whenever he heard someone give Winsor McCay credit for inventing animation. Muttering under his breath, his bushy mustache twitching, he would rush over to correct the offender. If the claim ever appeared in a newspaper, he’d quickly dash off a strongly worded letter to the editor. Such false claims often came from America, prompting Cohl to joke that “American ingenuity” was just a euphemism for stealing other people’s work.
Throughout his career, Cohl had problems with people stealing credit from him. But once, in 1907, it worked to his advantage. He was walking down a street in Paris when he spotted a poster for a movie that stole its concept from one of his comic strips. Cohl figured that the film company, Gaumont, now probably owed him money, or at least some kind of credit. He stormed into the studio and demanded to speak with the person in charge. When he left, he had somehow managed to finagle a new career directing movies—it was a new industry then, and barriers to entry were low.
Cinema intrigued Cohl; this new art form had so many possibilities. He particularly admired film director Georges Méliès, whose films—The Vanishing Lady, The Cave of the Demons, and A Trip to the Moon, among others—were all known for their elaborate special effects and imaginative sequences. As a former magician, Cohl no doubt wondered how Méliès had accomplished his visual effects. After seeing Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel, he studied a copy of the film frame by frame, figuring out exactly how it worked.
A still from Émile Cohl’s animated Un Drame Chez les Fantoches, 1908.
When Cohl decided to make his first animated film, in 1908, he was fifty-one years old and a veteran political cartoonist. He had much life experience. For his cartoon, he drew inspiration from his involvement in the Incoherents, a short-lived French art movement started by his friend Jules Lévy in 1882. Sporting a mustache resembling the wings of a condor in flight, Lévy was given to immodest pronouncements, per his era’s fashion of avant-garde manifestos. When he announced his art movement, a predecessor of dadaism, he declared that “gaity is properly French, so let’s be French.” To him, this meant the embrace of absurdist satire, dreams, and practical jokes. The Incoherents’ first exhibit, in 1883, was billed as “an exhibition of drawings by people who do not know how to draw.” It featured paintings like Negroes Fight in a Tunnel, which was nothing but a black canvas, and short films like “A cardinal eating lobster and tomatoes by the Red Sea,” which was nothing but a red screen. Cohl wanted to give his first animated cartoon a sensibility similar to these exhibitions: insanity as its own aesthetic.
Un Drame, 1908. Drawing by Émile Cohl representing the surreal nature of his early animated films.
Cohl’s animated film consisted of seven hundred separate drawings in India ink on white rice paper, traced and retraced over a light box. Although the film would be projected at a rate of sixteen frames per second, Cohl cut his work in half by making only eight drawings for each second, then photographing each twice, helping to slow down the action and improve the fluidity of motion. When the film was developed, he asked that it be printed in negative to create a white-on-black effect. The final film was barely two minutes long and featured what were essentially stick figures. The action, however, was highly imaginative, calling to mind a stoned dream about the circus. The Incoherents would have been proud. The stick figures drift through an alternative dimension before becoming trapped in a bottle that suddenly transforms into a flower. Stepping out onto the stem of the flower, they soon found it turning into an elephant’s trunk. Cohl called his cartoon Fantasmagorie, borrowing the name from what lantern showman Étienne-Gaspard Robert of Liège had presented to audiences in 1794.
Fantasmagorie was shown in France but didn’t appear widely in the United States. Few Americans saw it, and none of America’s early animators ever cited it as an inspiration. Instead, they typically referenced Winsor McCay’s work, a habit that Cohl would later haughtily point to as evidence of American “provincialism.”
In 1912, one year after McCay premiered Little Nemo in Slumberland, Émile Cohl moved to America to begin making movies, including animated cartoons. Stepping off the boat onto Ellis Island, he was promptly met by a customs agent who asked him to shave his mustache for “sanitary reasons.” Cohl hesitated because his mustache—long and swoopy and twisted at the ends—had symbolic value. He had worn it for decades in honor of André Gill, a famous caricaturist who taught Cohl the art of political cartooning. Gill had once used a cartoon to lampoon the incompetence of Napoleon III, an act that got him briefly thrown into jail but also made him a legend among French cartoonists. Without the mustache, Cohl resembled a plain-looking shopkeeper, or perhaps a jeweler—the kind of “practical” jobs his father had once pressured him to take, before Gill taught him about cartooning.
Cohl shaved the mustached but started growing it back immediately thereafter. Then he made his way to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he started a job working for the American outpost of France’s Éclair Studio.
Before Hollywood became the undisputed capital of America’s movie industry, many big studios were located in and around Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Almost all of Hollywood’s first generation of moguls—Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn of MGM, and William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation, among others—had grown up in New York. Fort Lee offered ample studio space and easy access to shooting locations. Because of the area’s early role as a film center, it also became the center of the animation industry, which would linger there long after the live-action studios moved to California.
One of Émile Cohl’s first assignments for Éclair was directing The Newlyweds, an animated series based on a popular American comic strip by George McManus, the cartoonist who first challenged Winsor McCay to make his animated cartoon Little Nemo in Slumberland. The studio wanted it as a regularly recurring series and Cohl did all the work himself. Because drawing the images by hand took a long time, he devised a shortcut using stop-motion photography and cutout figures similar to paper dolls. This was an enormous timesaver but resulted in a rudimentary appearance and jerky motion. In the end, the shoddy quality didn’t particularly matter because theaters wanted the cartoons mainly for novelty effect, to play as a short amusement before their main features. Advertisements for Cohl’s cartoons brought to mind flyers for a magician’s set. “The Newlyweds are not real people dressed up to imitate the famous McManus cartoons, but are drawings that move!” an Éclair poster read. Newspaper stories covering the new series mark the first time anyone used the term “animated cartoons.”
None of the newspapers ever gave Cohl credit—the name of George McManus, as creator of the comic strip, was far more marketable. Émile’s name was recognizable in France, but rarely surfaced in American papers; when it did, it was often misspelled as “Emil.”
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