historyThe Public Domain Review1908 · France
Fantasmagorie, made in 1908, is often called the first hand-drawn animated cartoon
Fantasmagorie is a 1908 short by the French caricaturist Émile Cohl, and many film historians regard it as the first animated cartoon. It was made from roughly 700 drawings on paper, each one photographed onto film, so the figures seem to be drawn on a blackboard. The blackboard look is an illusion created by the filming. The title refers to the fantasmagorie, a mid-19th-century version of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images onto walls.
Each drawing was photographed separately onto negative film, and the image came out light on dark, so the drawn lines looked like white chalk on a black board.
Before this, animation was mostly done with stop-motion objects or hand-tinted shots, so a film built entirely from drawings was a new kind of cinema. Cohl's method of drawing frame by frame became the basis of the cartoon industry that followed.
Image: The Public Domain Review
