Emile Cohl

Paint on glass Animation

< Young Emile Cohl : "The Father of the Animated Cartoon"

Created one of the first cartoon characters, named 'Fantoche' (below)

A brief history taken from 'The Bioscope'...

"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 figureFantasmagorie (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."