Studio: Charles Armstrong (Cumberland Works, Kew)
Distributor: Charles Urban Trading Company
Produced by: Charles Armstrong
Short Synopsis
The film is a circus act in seven short scenes, separated by stretches of black. A clown performs with his donkey: juggling, tumbling and setting up tricks that the animal either completes or spoils. A circus monkey helps out in some of the scenes. Between routines the clown plays practical jokes, and he keeps turning to face the audience with knowing gestures, as if inviting the viewers to be his accomplices. There is no larger story beyond the sequence of turns; the pleasure is in watching each trick land, or fail to.
Why It Matters
- The figures are white silhouettes in strict profile against a black field, the reverse of the black paper cut-outs most people associate with silhouette film. Moving jointed figures this cleanly, frame by frame, in 1910 is the visible showpiece, and the clown's asides to the camera give the act a real performer's personality.
- It is the only one of Charles Armstrong's animated films known to survive. He made silhouette films from 1909 until 1915, including political satires such as Votes for Women: A Caricature, and this short is the one surviving piece of evidence for a British line of silhouette animation that predates Lotte Reiniger's better-known work by more than a decade.
Notes and Trivia
- It was Armstrong's third known silhouette film, after The Sporting Mice and Votes for Women: A Caricature (both 1909).
- Historians have read the circus setting as fitting for animation's status at the time: a novelty turn, shown to demonstrate a trick of technique more than to tell a story.
- The release month is documented, but the "01-01" in this entry's file date is a placeholder, not a confirmed day.
- See also: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), where Reiniger took silhouette animation to feature length.