Author Archive: Retro

The titles tell us this film is based on an incident in the Boxer Rebellion. A man tries to defend a woman and a large house against Chinese attackers. They attack with swords, guns, and paddles. He’s over-matched. What will become of the mission, its defenders, and its occupants?

Animation by Widsor McCay.

The first all-animated film in history, a series of scenes without much narrative structure, but morphing into each other.

Abstract animation illustrates Edwin Gerschefski’s modernist composition. Two dots one blue and one orange appear most often, sometimes large, sometimes small, sometimes overlapping. When the sounds become more staccato, so do the images: wavy lines become squiggles, short naillike lines go across the screen in rows. The result is a visual representation of abstract music, lively and spirited in spite of its link to a dance composed to sweat out the poisons of a spider bite.

The nightmare of Émile Cohl’s chalk animation is one of unreliable appearances. Fishermen catch fish which eat them whole. Ladders transform into coils which just as suddenly take the form of angry mustachioed soldiers. The human figure at the receiving end of these transmogrifications is subject to all manner of degradations. Genuinely unsettling, THE PUPPET’S NIGHTMARE anticipates Don Hertzfeldt’s stick-figure fantasias by a century.

The first all-animated film in history, a series of scenes without much narrative structure, but morphing into each other.

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.

An animated dramatization of the notorious World War I German torpedoing of the ocean liner, Lusitania.