The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

Voyage to the Moon
in 1902. Its imaginative use of fantasy 
and special effects paved the way to the fi rst experiments with 
animation, a few years later. Watch it here: 
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=681138103275355387#
In 1906, J. Stuart Blackton produced 
The Humorous Phases of 
Funny Faces
that is considered the fi rst known attempt at stop-frame 
animation. Blackton incorporated drawn sequences that were shot 
frame by frame using a combination of blackboard, chalk and 
cut-outs for his animated forms. Watch it here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dRe85cNXwg
The following year, Blackton produced another short fi lm 
called 
The Haunted Hotel
. The fi lm used stop motion of 
three-dimensional objects. Wine was poured into a glass, 
bread was cut and a table was laid without apparent human 
agency. The fi lm was very successful and helped popularize 
animation as a highly playful art form.
Emile Cohl who had been a successful comic strip artist made a 
short fi lm called 
Fantasmagorie
(1908) which fi lm history tends to 
consider the fi rst drawing-based animated fi lm, a simple series of 
dreamlike images of stick fi gures. Watch it here: 
http://vimeo.com/9231846
Cohl went on to produce hundreds of shorts but died in poverty. 
Others continued to explore the form such as Arthur Melbourne 
Cooper in his fi lm 
Dreams of Toyland
(1908) which animated real 
toys in a long-distance precursor to 
Toy Story
(1995). View the 
complete 1908 fi lm here (registration is needed): 
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/fi lm/id/1354093/
In the early years of the twentieth century in North America, 
cartoonist Winsor McCay moved into fi lmmaking and created the 
landmark short fi lm 
Gertie the Dinosaur
. Watch the fi lm here: 
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=746195425819461946#

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14
The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
No history of animation would be complete without a mention 
of the work of Walt Disney. Silly Symphonies is a series of 75 
animated shorts, produced by his studio from 1929 to 1939. 
Watch The Three Little Pigs here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olo923T2HQ4
Alongside Disney the other high profi le animation studio in America 
during the 1920s and 1930s was that of Dave and Max Fleischer. 
Indeed, it was the Fleischers who produced the fi rst feature 
animation in documentary form, 
The Einstein Theory of Relativity
. 
Watch it here: 
http://www.vintagetooncast.com/2006/11/einstein-theory-of-relativity.html
Based in New York, the Fleischer studio aesthetic was founded 
less on the realism that Disney pursued and much more on what 
writer Norman Klein, in his book 
7 Minutes: The Life and Death of 
the American Cartoon
, calls turning the world upside down. The 
studio’s greatest early success was the series Out of the Inkwell, 
which combined live action (an animator) and animation (a clown 
called Ko-Ko who climbed out of an inkwell and interacted with the 
animator). The studio would go on to produce 
Popeye
and 
Betty 
Boop
, which the Hays Code deemed too sexy and so, had to be 
toned down.
A Colour Box
, 1935, by Len Lye is an advertisement for 
‘cheaper 
parcel post’
, and was screened to a general audience. It was 
made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the fi lm itself, and 
synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and 

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Getting Started
15
His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 
2005 by the Annecy fi lm festival put this fi lm among the top ten most 
signifi cant works in the history of animation. Watch it here: http://
www.dailymotion.com/video/x4r76e_a-color-box-len-lye-1935_creation
Russian animation has yielded classics such as