Émile Cohl

'Fantasmagorie' (1908) was Cohl's first venture into animation and it is regarded by film historians as the first fully animated cartoon. Such was the mysteriousness of the process at that time that it became a common motif to include the artist's hands at work within the frame. General audiences would not have quite yet understood what animation was, and here we see how much it would have been viewed as a novel magic trick.