Truly Dreadful Film

Just perfect...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)*** (out of 4)When viewing this animated short people must remember that it was made even before D.W. Griffith started making pictures! This three minute film basically has chalk drawings coming to life in front of our eyes. The animation technology certainly grew as time went along but I can't see how anyone could watch this and not be impressed with what they were doing. The trick photography is really impressive and I also thought the drawings were extremely good. I really liked the first man and woman and how the man's smoke was used to cover up the woman. This is certainly a very early use of animation and it looks extremely well.

This film is made by James Stuart Blackton in U.S.A. At the first, blackboard and a human hand appears in the film. Then, the human hand draws pictures which are a man and a woman with choke. After that, the human hand disappears from the screen and stories which the man and the woman drawn begin. The painter's hand appears sometimes in the screen and the hand erasers pictures on the blackboard. And new story begins in the film. This film is made still in the era of silent. So, we can watch now many kinds of the film added later versions sounds. In addition, it is said that this film is the first animated movie in the world. The characters move in comical and those actions are in light. People who have seen the film are interested in story changing. In the early days of animation movie there is a live-action part. We can also see the history of movie is seen. It is one of the interesting characteristics of this movie.

This film is highly reminiscent of some of the films by Georges Méliès because of the film's extensive use of trick cinematography--an art perfected by Méliès before the director of this film got his start. In fact, the Méliès short THE UNTAMABLE WHISKERS (1904) is an awful lot like this film except instead of just having cartoons come to life due to stop-motion, this earlier film features Georges Méliès himself interacting with the drawings. Both are pretty antiquated by today's standards, but because they are short and pretty creative, they are also both very watchable. This J. Stuart Blackton film isn't quite as good or innovative, but this shouldn't stop you from giving it a look on google video.

The artist's hand and a blackboard..a quick sketch of a face..another face, a cigar, a cloud of smoke, and suddenly, a whole new art form is born. No genius here, absolutely terrible drawing, but it's the first one as far as we know, and deserves a bit of credit just for that..Melies did stop motion first, and there were hundreds of flip books using the persistence of vision to animate line drawings before this silly little strip of celluloid came along. Nonetheless, everyone who has ever enjoyed a Tex Avery or Disney cartoon should know the humble origins of the form, and this is one example.