The film largely consists of a stick man moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower which becomes an elephant. There are also sections of live action where the animator's hands enter the scene. The main character is drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters are a clown and a gentleman. Other characters include a woman in a film theater wearing a large hat with gigantic feathers, and a strongman.
The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is taken from the original French word for "phantasmagoria", a mid-19th century magic lantern show with moving images of ghosts.[2]
History
Fantasmagorie (1908)
Cohl worked on Fantasmagorie from February to either May or June 1908. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a stream of consciousness style. The film was released on 17 August 1908.
In 2008, when the film turned 100 years old, the Serbian artist Rastko Ćirić created a film called "Fantasmagorie 2008" to celebrate 100 years of the film and pay homage to Cohl.[3]
Production
The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was exposed twice (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes.
^Vilas-Boas, Eric; Maher, John, eds. (5 October 2020). "The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation". Vulture. The next year, Cohl made Fantasmagorie, whose title is a reference to the "fantasmograph," a mid-19th-century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images onto surrounding walls.
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