Studio: Vitagraph Company of America
Short Synopsis
The film opens on a live-action hand drawing on a chalkboard. Blackton sketches the outline of a man's face and then a woman's, and once his hand withdraws the drawings finish themselves and come alive. The man rolls his eyes and leers at the woman, who reacts; he puffs on a cigar until the smoke clouds the whole board. A sour-looking gentleman with an umbrella and hat appears, and the cartoonist's hand returns to wipe him away with a cloth, erasing the joke in plain sight. Later sections use cut-out figures rather than redrawn chalk: a clown performs tricks with his hat and a poodle jumps through a hoop. The title card itself is drawn on screen letter by letter, so the film announces from its first seconds that the drawings, not the actors, are the show.
Why It Matters
- The erasing gag is the one to watch for. Blackton puts the artist's hand and the eraser on screen, so the audience sees a character being drawn into existence and then rubbed out, a joke about the medium that animators kept returning to for the next century.
- Film historians generally treat it as the first animated film recorded on standard picture film. Most of the motion is achieved with stop-motion and cut-outs, but a short passage changes the drawings themselves frame by frame, which is the technique that animation as an industry would be built on.
Notes and Trivia
- Blackton was a newspaper cartoonist who had performed "lightning sketch" chalk-talks on stage before co-founding Vitagraph; the film is essentially that act, rebuilt with a camera that could make the drawings move on their own.
- The surviving film runs at about 20 frames per second.
- Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) borrows the white-line-on-black blackboard look that Blackton used here.
- See also: Fantasmagorie (1908), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).