J. Stuart Blackton

My son Tobias came home from his high school video production class this week and told me that his teacher has shown a clip of Gertie the Dinosaur.

He said that Gertie was the first animation and that might be on the test!

Did you tell him that he was wrong? Did you mention J. Stuart Blackton
or Emile Cohl? I said trying not to raise my voice and failing.

I didn`t want to contradict him in front of the class.

Toby has always been smarter than me when it comes to matters like this. Or maybe he doesn`t have my passion about early days of animation.

I hounded my poor son for most of the week and finally printed out the first 6 pages of my animation timeline for him to take in. He got his teacher aside and gave him the timeline. The teacher said that he had gotten his information from the same video from which he got the Gertie clip. I don`t doubt it.

Everybody in the U. S. conveniently forgets Emile Cohl and J. Sturat Blackton. I fear that the overlooking of Emile Cohl may have more to do with him being French. Stefan Kanfer in Serious Business dismisses Cohl in one short paragraph.

But then why is Blackton overlooked? I don`t think it has anything to do with him being born in England because most people are not aware that he was not born in the U. S. A.

I love the work of Winsor McCay, Gertie, Nemo, Steve the Mosquito, the Flying House, the Pet, but I have always been a little put out by his bold faced claim of having invented the animation process. Emile Cohl use to storm `sure McCay invented the animation process, 3 years after I did`. But then Cohl overlooked the work of Blackton.

Gertie the Dinosaur wasn`t even Mccay`s first animation. He did both Little Nemo 1911 and How a Mosquito Operates in 1912 before doing his Gertie animation for his vaudeville act. By that time Emile Cohl had created some 20 animations including the almost completely lost to fire George McManus comic strip adaptations of the Newly Weds animations that he did at Eclair Studio in Fort Lee, N.J.

If you want to count the cut out animation in J. Stuart Blackton`s Humorous Phases of a Funny Face as the first true animation then we have an animation created 5 years before McCay`s first animation and 8 years before Gertie.




Emile Cohl

Any way you look at it McCay`s title card claim of being the inventor of the animation process is untrue. But like a lot of untruths that are repeated over and over again this one has found its way into too many minds, books, and videos.



larry@agni-animation.com

  ¶ 9:28 PM