Studio: Gaumont
Short Synopsis
An artist's live-action hand draws a stick-figure clown, and the clown immediately sets off on his own. What follows is less a plot than a chain of transformations, each object turning into the next before the eye has settled on it. A bottle becomes a flower, the flower becomes an elephant, and the clown keeps getting caught up in the changes. In one scene he sits in a theatre behind a woman whose enormous feathered hat blocks the view; he plucks the feathers one by one until she turns on him. A gentleman and a strongman come and go, the clown is knocked to pieces, and the artist's hands reach back in to reassemble him. He ends the film riding off, the drawings still refusing to hold one shape for long.
Why It Matters
- Watch the theatre-hat gag. It is a fully formed little comedy of annoyance and revenge, worked out in a few seconds of white lines on black, and it shows Cohl thinking in jokes and reactions rather than just in moving pictures.
- It is widely regarded by film historians as the first fully hand-drawn animated cartoon. Cohl made it from about 700 drawings on paper, each shot twice, and printed them in negative so the black lines read as chalk on a blackboard. The look was probably borrowed from Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, but here every frame is drawn rather than cut out.
Notes and Trivia
- The title comes from the phantasmagoria, the 19th-century magic lantern show of projected ghosts.
- Its stream of non-sequitur changes is a tribute to the Incohérents, the Paris art movement of the 1880s that Cohl had belonged to.
- Cohl worked on the film from February to around June 1908.
- The original negative is presumed lost. The best surviving copy is a 16 mm print, the only known full-frame one, found by Serge Bromberg for the film's centenary at Annecy in 2008 and later donated to the Academy Film Archive; Gaumont restored its 35 mm copy from it.
- See also: Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).