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Chapter 2

“Fantasmagorie”

Winsor McCay didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum, and they weren’t the result of a sudden epiphany. For centuries, people had been fascinated with the idea of animation, of making drawings appear to move. McCay’s achievements were just the next breakthrough in a long series.

In prehistoric times, people probably waved flickering torches in front of cave drawings to make them appear to move. By the time of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), shadow puppets—cut from buffalo hide and moved around behind a screen—were a common way to tell popular stories of the day. Centuries later, shadow puppets became popular in Europe as well. By this point, people were using mathematics coupled with new lens technologies to study light and motion. In 1645, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow). In the last chapter, he mentioned a lantern containing a candle and a curved mirror that, if manipulated in the right way, could make cutout shapes appear to move. This wasn’t technically animation, but it was exciting—so exciting, in fact, that some called it witchcraft. Kircher, who had always wanted to be a missionary and didn’t appreciate the witchcraft accusations, reassured everyone by using his device to show Bible scenes. Once everyone was calmed down, the path was then clear for other entrepreneurs to use Kircher’s techniques for something more important: making money.

A Dutchman named Pieter van Musschenbroek quickly improved upon Kircher’s lantern by fitting it with a disc containing sequential images that, when turned, made the images appear to move in a more sophisticated manner. Then, a Frenchman, Abbé Guyot, compiled this and the growing number of other animation techniques in his book Rational Recreations in Which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated, by a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments. Insofar as lantern showmen could remember the title, this was the book they couldn’t stop talking about. “Magical theater” shows took off like a dance craze.

One lantern showman stood out from all the others, a Frenchman named Étienne-Gaspard Robert of Liège. In the 1790s he developed a spooky show, “Fantasmagorie,” which quickly grew famous. By 1794, at the height of the French Revolution, his crowds were so big that he had to move his show to the ruins of a large old monastery in Paris. Audiences filed into the darkened crypts, dim candlelight reflecting off piles of neatly stacked bones, to gaze at flickering portraits of fallen heroes from the recent fighting. A grand finale featured the Grim Reaper floating through the air, reminding everyone of “the fate that awaits us all.”

In 1824, Peter Mark Roget, who would later become famous for his thesaurus, published The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects. It described how the human eye will blend a series of sequential images into motion if the images are shown fast enough. Two years later, John Ayrton Paris built on this idea by inventing a toy called a “thaumatrope,” consisting of a string threaded through a disc with a different image on each side—say a bird on one side and a cage on the other. When spun, the images seemed to combine, making it appear that, in this example, the bird was in the cage. A dispute then arose over who invented the thaumatrope—the contenders included Paris himself, Charles Babbage, Dr. William Fitton, Sir John Herschel, and Dr. William Wollaston­—­but the argument faded as thaumatropes were replaced by Fantoscopes. These featured a greater number of discs and shutterlike slits allowing for more sophisticated movement.

In 1834, the Englishman William Horner invented what he called the “daedalum,” or Wheel of the Devil, which didn’t become popular until the 1860s, after it was renamed the “zoetrope,” or Wheel of Life, which sounded more pleasant. The zoetrope was a hollow drum with slits on the sides where paper was fed in. Images were printed on the paper, and when the drum was turned, the images appeared to move.

By 1868, flipbooks were popular. These contained sequential images that appeared to move when the pages were flipped quickly. They were given as gifts and promotions, like one that was entitled “Turkish Trophies” and given out with cigarettes; the cover billed it as an instruction manual for deep-breathing exercises, but the naughty images inside showed pornography instead.

In 1877, the Frenchman Charles-Émile Reynaud invented the praxinoscope, a device similar to the zoetrope except that it used mirrors instead of slits on the side of a moving drum. In practice, it worked much like the old lantern shows. Reynaud called his lantern plays pantomimes lumineuses and enjoyed subject matter depicting the wild and surreal, such as one show portraying a black boy juggling his own head. These shows were quite popular, seen by an estimated 500,000 people between 1892 and 1900.

The praxinoscope was an early technology used to animate images.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, many artists were experimenting with new cameras that recorded motion. Thomas Edison was experimenting with what he called a “mutoscope,” a mechanical flipbook where sequential photographs were attached to a ring outfitted with a crank (Winsor McCay used a mutoscope to check the movement of his Little Nemo in Slumberland cartoon). Edison was also experimenting with the “kinetograph,” a kind of motion picture peep show that viewers could watch through a small pane of glass.

Eventually, some of the old ideas were combined with the new motion picture technology. In 1906, an American cartoonist named James Stuart Blackton created a short film entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. His process was simple: he drew some faces on a blackboard with chalk, photographed them, changed them slightly, photographed them again, and so on. When the film played, the faces appeared to come alive; in the film, the face of a woman blows smoke into the face of a man. Most film historians consider this to actually be the first animated cartoon. Winsor McCay knew James Stuart Blackton, and he almost certainly saw Blackton’s film, although he never mentioned it.

The next year, Blackton made another film, The Haunted Hotel. Best described as a “trick film,” it used stop-motion photography to make random household objects appear to move on their own—a teapot pouring itself, a knife floating across a room to cut a loaf of bread. The film eventually made its way to France, where it was seen by Émile Cohl, a cartoonist who had once worked as a magician in Paris. After seeing Blackton’s film, but before McCay would make Little Nemo, Cohl decided that he also wanted to make animated cartoons.

Émile Cohl got upset whenever he heard someone give Winsor McCay credit for inventing animation. Muttering under his breath, his bushy mustache twitching, he would rush over to correct the offender. If the claim ever appeared in a newspaper, he’d quickly dash off a strongly worded letter to the editor. Such false claims often came from America, prompting Cohl to joke that “American ingenuity” was just a euphemism for stealing other people’s work.

Throughout his career, Cohl had problems with people stealing credit from him. But once, in 1907, it worked to his advantage. He was walking down a street in Paris when he spotted a poster for a movie that stole its concept from one of his comic strips. Cohl figured that the film company, Gaumont, now probably owed him money, or at least some kind of credit. He stormed into the studio and demanded to speak with the person in charge. When he left, he had somehow managed to finagle a new career directing movies—it was a new industry then, and barriers to entry were low.

Cinema intrigued Cohl; this new art form had so many possibilities. He particularly admired film director Georges Méliès, whose films—The Vanishing Lady, The Cave of the Demons, and A Trip to the Moon, among others—were all known for their elaborate special effects and imaginative sequences. As a former magician, Cohl no doubt wondered how Méliès had accomplished his visual effects. After seeing Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel, he studied a copy of the film frame by frame, figuring out exactly how it worked.

A still from Émile Cohl’s animated Un Drame Chez les Fantoches, 1908.

When Cohl decided to make his first animated film, in 1908, he was fifty-one years old and a veteran political cartoonist. He had much life experience. For his cartoon, he drew inspiration from his involvement in the Incoherents, a short-lived French art movement started by his friend Jules Lévy in 1882. Sporting a mustache resembling the wings of a condor in flight, Lévy was given to immodest pronouncements, per his era’s fashion of avant-garde manifestos. When he announced his art movement, a predecessor of dadaism, he declared that “gaity is properly French, so let’s be French.” To him, this meant the embrace of absurdist satire, dreams, and practical jokes. The Incoherents’ first exhibit, in 1883, was billed as “an exhibition of drawings by people who do not know how to draw.” It featured paintings like Negroes Fight in a Tunnel, which was nothing but a black canvas, and short films like “A cardinal eating lobster and tomatoes by the Red Sea,” which was nothing but a red screen. Cohl wanted to give his first animated cartoon a sensibility similar to these exhibitions: insanity as its own aesthetic.

Un Drame, 1908. Drawing by Émile Cohl representing the surreal nature of his early animated films.

Cohl’s animated film consisted of seven hundred separate drawings in India ink on white rice paper, traced and retraced over a light box. Although the film would be projected at a rate of sixteen frames per second, Cohl cut his work in half by making only eight drawings for each second, then photographing each twice, helping to slow down the action and improve the fluidity of motion. When the film was developed, he asked that it be printed in negative to create a white-on-black effect. The final film was barely two minutes long and featured what were essentially stick figures. The action, however, was highly imaginative, calling to mind a stoned dream about the circus. The Incoherents would have been proud. The stick figures drift through an alternative dimension before becoming trapped in a bottle that suddenly transforms into a flower. Stepping out onto the stem of the flower, they soon found it turning into an elephant’s trunk. Cohl called his cartoon Fantasmagorie, borrowing the name from what lantern showman Étienne-Gaspard Robert of Liège had presented to audiences in 1794.

Fantasmagorie was shown in France but didn’t appear widely in the United States. Few Americans saw it, and none of America’s early animators ever cited it as an inspiration. Instead, they typically referenced Winsor McCay’s work, a habit that Cohl would later haughtily point to as evidence of American “provincialism.”

In 1912, one year after McCay premiered Little Nemo in Slumberland, Émile Cohl moved to America to begin making movies, including animated cartoons. Stepping off the boat onto Ellis Island, he was promptly met by a customs agent who asked him to shave his mustache for “sanitary reasons.” Cohl hesitated because his mustache—long and swoopy and twisted at the ends—had symbolic value. He had worn it for decades in honor of André Gill, a famous caricaturist who taught Cohl the art of political cartooning. Gill had once used a cartoon to lampoon the incompetence of Napoleon III, an act that got him briefly thrown into jail but also made him a legend among French cartoonists. Without the mustache, Cohl resembled a plain-looking shopkeeper, or perhaps a jeweler—the kind of “practical” jobs his father had once pressured him to take, before Gill taught him about cartooning.

Cohl shaved the mustached but started growing it back immediately thereafter. Then he made his way to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he started a job working for the American outpost of France’s Éclair Studio.

Before Hollywood became the undisputed capital of America’s movie industry, many big studios were located in and around Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Almost all of Hollywood’s first generation of moguls—Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn of MGM, and William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation, among others—had grown up in New York. Fort Lee offered ample studio space and easy access to shooting locations. Because of the area’s early role as a film center, it also became the center of the animation industry, which would linger there long after the live-action studios moved to California.

One of Émile Cohl’s first assignments for Éclair was directing The Newlyweds, an animated series based on a popular American comic strip by George McManus, the cartoonist who first challenged Winsor McCay to make his animated cartoon Little Nemo in Slumberland. The studio wanted it as a regularly recurring series and Cohl did all the work himself. Because drawing the images by hand took a long time, he devised a shortcut using stop-motion photography and cutout figures similar to paper dolls. This was an enormous timesaver but resulted in a rudimentary appearance and jerky motion. In the end, the shoddy quality didn’t particularly matter because theaters wanted the cartoons mainly for novelty effect, to play as a short amusement before their main features. Advertisements for Cohl’s cartoons brought to mind flyers for a magician’s set. “The Newlyweds are not real people dressed up to imitate the famous McManus cartoons, but are drawings that move!” an Éclair poster read. Newspaper stories covering the new series mark the first time anyone used the term “animated cartoons.”

None of the newspapers ever gave Cohl credit—the name of George McManus, as creator of the comic strip, was far more marketable. Émile’s name was recognizable in France, but rarely surfaced in American papers; when it did, it was often misspelled as “Emil.”

In 1912, Cohl saw Winsor McCay’s second cartoon, The Story of a Mosquito, during a show at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. In his diary, he raved about it. The cartoon was spooky but also enchanting and fun, like the ideas the Incoherents used to come up with. It featured a mosquito named Steve that occasionally descends on a sleeping man to drink his blood, Steve's abdomen filling like a water balloon before finally bursting. In many ways, it captured the same playful sense that Cohl was going for, except that it was much more elaborate and better drawn. McCay had spent months producing the cartoon and the result was gorgeous. Cohl called him “the most skillful and most graceful draftsman of the United States.”

In 1914, Cohl saw Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay’s third film, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was the kind of masterpiece that can change an artist’s perspective. Nobody knew it yet, but Gertie is the film that would inspire many young cartoonists to try animation. (Walt Disney spoke of his first time seeing Gertie the same way priests talk of finding God.) The film was only a few minutes long but had taken McCay nearly two years to make in his free time away from his day job drawing for the newspaper. Every part of Gertie was painstakingly precise. McCay had timed his breaths with a stopwatch in order to capture the motions of Gertie’s heavy breathing, and no matter what Gertie was doing—throwing rocks at a mastodon, munching on trees, performing a dance number—her movements were perfect. The cartoon had little plot, but what made it significant was that Gertie showed personality: petulance, docility, humor, anger. Winsor had been able to capture these emotions with the subtlest of gestures—a crinkle around her eyes, a slight change to her smile. This was the film that would cement his reputation and make him the patron saint of animation.

Ever the showman, McCay started showing Gertie as part of a vaudeville act. As the cartoon played, Winsor stood to the side of the stage and shouted “commands” at his character. He wore long coattails and cracked a bullwhip, like a lion tamer, playfully telling the crowd that Gertie was “The only dinosaur in captivity!” For a sequence featuring Gertie eating apples, McCay would toss real apples up and behind the screen. The show was clever and drew large, paying crowds, prompting Cohl to later write, a bit huffily, “It was lucrative for McCay who never left the theater without stopping by the cashier to be laden with a few banknotes on the way out.”

Émile Cohl’s frustration grew over the years. In the 1930s, long after he had moved back to France, reporters would occasionally visit but find him irritable. Sitting in his humble quarters—a dingy spare bedroom in his brother’s house—the reporters would ask him about his political cartoons, but Cohl would always change the topic to animation. He was annoyed that the French press called animation le mouvement Américain, ignoring the contributions that the French, and by French he mainly meant himself, had also made. He told one reporter from Pour Vous that the French didn’t promote themselves as well as the Americans did, and this also bothered him.

Poor promotional skills might be one reason Cohl was forgotten, but another (much more likely) reason was that almost all the cartoons he animated in America were destroyed. A fire roared through the Éclair studios in Fort Lee a day after he set sail back to France, in 1914. Film stock back then was highly flammable, much more so than today, and the studio flared up like a Roman candle. Only one of Cohl’s Newlyweds cartoons survived, and few other prints ever surfaced later. Nobody was thus able to see his legacy, which survived mainly by word of mouth.

During his later years, Cohl told another story of his time in America, this one verging on conspiracy. He said two strangers had visited him while he was living in New Jersey—one talkative, the other silent. They demanded to know how animated cartoons were made, but refused to reveal what they intended to do with the information. It remains unclear exactly what Cohl told them. Perhaps not coincidentally, a similar visit was made to Winsor McCay around the same time, according to John Fitzsimmons, McCay’s assistant during the time he made Gertie. He said that a man had showed up on McCay’s doorstep asking to learn his methods; McCay, eager to promote animation in the way that a missionary is eager to spread the word, gladly showed him. But this visitor had motives different from McCay’s. The blossoming industry had attracted the attention of men who were more interested in profit than art.