Émile Cohl, Master of Animation

Cadres fleuris
R: Émile Cohl. P: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Fr 1910

En route
R: Émile Cohl. P: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Fr 1910

Les aventures du baron du Crac
R: Émile Cohl. P: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Fr 1910

Affaires de coeur
R: Émile Cohl. P: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Fr 1909

“Cohl (born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet) first established himself as a caricaturist, cartoonist and writer in the 1880s/90s. In 1908 he joined the Gaumont film company, originally as a writer. He soon graduated to directing comedy, chase and féerie (magical films in the style of Georges Méliès) films, but then moved to making animation films, a kind of film only just starting to be created, largely through the example in America of J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Haunted Hotel (1907) opened up a whole new world of cinematic possibility.

Cohl worked with line drawings, cut-outs, puppets and other media. He also took the idea of animation one step further by cresting a character, Fantoche. His first animated film, the delightful stick figure Fantasmagorie (1908), is held to be the first fully animated film, employing 700 drawings on sheets of paper, each photographed separately. Cohl developed a distinctive personal style of animation, where a figure would metamorphose into some unexpected different image, taunting notions of reality and logical sequence. Cohl made over 250 films between 1908 and 1923, working for Gaumont, Éclair (including a spell in America), Pathé and others. Thirty-seven (some of uncertain attribution) survive in film archives.”
Luke McKernan
The Bioscope