Émile Cohl (January 4, 1857 – January 20, 1938), born
Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
caricaturist of the largely-forgotten
Incoherent MovementThe Incoherents was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as...
,
cartoonistA cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. Traditionally much of this work was, and still is, humorous, and is intended primarily for entertainment purposes...
, and
animatorAn animator is an artist who creates multiple images called frames and Key frames that form an illusion of movement called animation when rapidly displayed. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, video games, and the internet. Usually, an animation piece requires the...
, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".
Biography
Despite their long ancestry, the
CourtetThe Courtet family has been in Paris back to the 10th century, to the time of Hugh Capet of France, and had never left Paris....
family was not high on the social ladder. Émile's father Elie was a rubber salesman, and his mother, Emilie Laure, was a linen seamstress. The rubber factory Elie worked for had many ups and downs, causing the family to move from one home in
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
to another.
Early years
During the first few years of Émile Courtet's life, France was ruled by
Napoleon III of FranceNapoleon III , Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, was the first President of the French Republic and the last monarch of France. He was also Napoleon I's nephew. Made president by popular vote in 1848, Napoleon III ascended to the throne on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoleon...
, nephew of
Napoleon I of FranceNapoleon Bonaparte later known as Napoleon I, and previously Napoleone di Buonaparte, was a military and political leader of France whose actions shaped European politics in the early 19th century.Born in Corsica and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France, Bonaparte rose to prominence...
, a protector of
middle classThe middle class are any class in the middle of a social schema. In Weberian socio-economic terms they are the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socioeconomically between the working class and upper class. In Marxist terms, middle class commonly refers to either the...
families like the Courtets. Émile saw little of his father during his childhood, and was over-protected by his ailing mother until her death in 1863. In 1864, at the age of 7, he was enrolled at the Ecole professionnelle de Pantin, a boarding school known as the Institute Vaudron after its founder. There his artistic talents were discovered and encouraged. The next year, a cold kept him in his father's apartment, where he began
stamp collectingStamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects, such as covers . It is one of the world's most popular hobbies, with estimates of the number of collectors ranging up to 20 million in the United States alone. - Collecting :Collecting is not the same as philately, which is...
, a hobby that would become his sole source of income several times in his life.
On July 15, 1870, the
Franco-Prussian WarThe Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between France and Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria...
began. France was invaded and Napoleon III was forced to surrender on the
battlefield of SedanThe Battle of Sedan was fought during the Franco-Prussian War on 1 September 1870. It resulted in the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and his army and practically decided the war in favor of Prussia and its allies, though fighting continued under a new French government.The 120,000 strong French...
. A "
French Third RepublicThe French Third Republic was the republican government of France between the end of the Second French Empire in 1870 and the Vichy Regime after the invasion of France by the German...
" was declared in Paris to succeed the "
Second French EmpireThe Second French Empire or Second Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
" of Napoleon III. Almost immediately, the city was besieged by Prussian armies. It fell on January 28, 1871, and foreign armies were occupying the streets of the capital when
Adolphe ThiersLouis-Adolphe was a French politician and historian. was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871...
was elected President of France. Thiers was too conservative for many Parisians, so a
Paris CommuneThe Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris, from March 28 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and socialists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class...
was declared, a sort of anti-government of radicals. The French Army, so ineffective against the Prussians, was used to wipe out the Commune while the Prussians watched. The Treaty of Frankfurt (May 10, 1871) ended the Franco-Prussian War and imposed an indemnity of 5 billion
francThe franc is the name of several currency units, most notably the French franc, the currency of France until it adopted the euro in 1999 , and the Swiss franc, still a major world currency today due to the prominence of Swiss financial institutions...
s on the losers. President Thiers organized finances to pay the indemnity, resigning on May 24, 1873.
The chaos caused by the siege of Paris led to the closing of Elie Courtet's factory. Émile was transferred to the less-exclusive Ecole Turgot, but his lessons were soon forgotten as the teenager wandered the streets of Paris to watch history being made. He made two discoveries that in time that became the controlling elements of his life:
GuignolGuignol is the main character in a French puppet show which has come to bear his name.Although often thought of as children’s entertainment, Guignol’s sharp wit and linguistic verve have always been appreciated by adults as well, as shown by the motto of a prominent Lyon troupe: “Guignol amuses...
puppet theater and political caricature.
Guignol was a form of drama (usually involving love triangles) where the characters were played by
marionetteA marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires, formerly strings but dropped due to increased durability of wires; a marionette's puppeteer is called a manipulator. Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or revealed to an audience by using a vertical or horizontal control...
s. A subtype of the
Guignol was
Fantoche, a form of puppetry where the puppeteer's head was stuck through a hole in a black sheet with a small puppet body underneath.
Political caricature had begun in France during the Second Empire, but had been suppressed by Napoleon III. During the free-for-all weeks of the Commune (all eleven of them), the caricaturists were free to post broadsheets on the streets for all to see. The center of this activity was the Rue du Croissant, only blocks from the Ecole Turgot.
In 1872, Elie Courtet placed his 15-year old son in a three-year apprenticeship with a jeweler. Émile drew caricatures, enlisted in the Cherbourg regiment, and drew some more. Elie placed him with a maritime insurance broker. Émile left the broker, got a much poorer-paying job with a philatelist and declared his preference for drawing, the
Bohemian lifestyleBohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits, with few permanent ties...
, and if necessary, going hungry.
Years with André Gill
In 1878, Émile obtained a letter of recommendation from
Étienne CarjatÉtienne Carjat, born in Fareins, , on 28 March 1828 and died in Paris on 19 March 1906, was a French journalist, caricaturist and photographer. He co-founded the magazine, Le Diogène, and founded the review, Le Boulevard...
to approach
André GillAndré Gill was a French caricaturist. Born Louis-Alexandre Gosset de Guînes at Paris, the son of the Comte de Guînes and Sylvie-Adeline Gosset, he studied at this city's Academy of Fine Arts. He adopted the pseudonym André Gill in homage to his hero, James Gillray. Gill began illustrating for...
, the best-known caricaturist of the day, for a job. Gill had made his fame a decade earlier by publishing
La Lune, a periodical critical of Napoleon III. His presses were smashed and he was incarcerated. He started
La Lune Rousse in 1876 to continue his work. By this time, he had moved beyond attacking individuals to making observations on the ludicrousness of conformist bourgeois values in general. However, the government was becoming increasingly liberal, leaving him with few big-name targets. As a result,
La Lune Rousse closed in 1879.
Émile Courtet's job as one of several assistants to Gill was to complete the backgrounds; he may have done a few of the illustrations by himself. During this process, the young man developed a style of caricature based on Gill's. Gill's trademark was the large, recognizable head of the target (with a fairly benign expression) atop a small puppet body (doing something ridiculous). Clearly, it was based on
Fantoche puppetry. Émile took this style and added touches to suggest movement and imagery from the rest of
Guignol puppetry. At about this time he adopted the pseudonym of
Émile Cohl. The meaning of "Cohl" is obscure: it may be from the pigment known as "kohl", or perhaps it means that Émile stuck to his mentor Gill like glue ("
colle" in French). Perhaps it was chosen because it sounded exotic. The visual signature of a paste-pot appears in a few of Cohl's caricatures.
Thiers was succeeded as president by
Patrice MacMahon, duc de MagentaMarie Edme Patrice Maurice de Mac-Mahon, 1st Duc de Magenta, Marshal of France was a French general and politician...
, a conservative monarchist who had been at Sedan. He became steadily less popular under the assault of caricatures. One of these, "Aveugle par Ac-Sedan", a French pun on "accidentally blind" and "Bungler at Sedan", put its creator, Émile Cohl, in jail on October 11, 1879, making him instantly famous. Three months later, MacMahon resigned in disgrace--the caricaturists liked to believe that they were responsible. He was succeeded by
Jules GrévyFrançois Paul Jules Grévy was a President of the French Third Republic and one of the leaders of the Opportunist Republicans faction...
, who transferred real power from the post of president to the prime minister and legislature. This led to a period of internal stability and prosperity for France.
Through Gill, Cohl had become acquainted with an artistic circle calling themselves the Hydropathes. The group was united by various "modern" ideas and a love of poetry. The group, like many others of the time, based most of their activities on shocking people. As a result of his new-found fame, Cohl was named editor of the group's spokes-piece,
L'Hydropathe, on October 28, 1879. At about this time Émile's estranged father died, leaving him a modest legacy. Émile Cohl set out to discover his abilities, writing and producing two satiric plays that did very poorly. The co-author of both plays was Norés (pseudonym of Edouard Norés), an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
who had been an architect before giving up his former life for
BohemianismBohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits, with few permanent ties...
on the banks of the
SeineThe Seine is a slow-flowing major river and commercial waterway within the regions of Île-de-France and Haute-Normandie in France and famous as a romantic backdrop in photographs of Paris, France. It is also a tourist attraction, with excursion boats offering sightseeing tours of the Rive Droite...
. Besides a strong friendship, Norés taught Cohl
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
, a useful skill later on.
End of the Hydropathes
Émile Cohl married on November 12, 1881; his wife later left him for an author. At the same time, André Gill was committed to the
Charenton mental asylumCharenton was an insane asylum, founded in 1645 by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton-Saint-Maurice , France....
. He managed to recover in a few months and in 1882 submitted his first serious painting, "Le Fou" (The Madman) to the
SalonThe Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the western world...
. The painting's poor reception by the artists of the Salon sent him back to Charenton.
Meanwhile, the Hydropathes had disbanded in 1882. Their place in Cohl's life was replaced by the
IncoherentsThe Incoherents was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as...
. The group was founded by Jules Lévy, who coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as a contrast to the common expression "les arts décoratifs". The Incoherents were even less politically-minded than the Hydropathes. Their slogan was "Gaity is properly French, so let's be French". The focus was
absurdismAbsurdism is a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe ultimately fail , because no such meaning exists, at least in relation to the individual...
,
nightmareA nightmare is an unpleasant dream. Nightmares cause a strong unpleasant emotional response from the sleeper, typically fear or horror. The dream may contain a situation of extreme danger, or sensations of pain, bad events, falling, drowning, being raped, becoming disabled, losing loved ones,...
s, and the drawing style of children. Cohl's Incoherent art joined his caricatures and satiric news reporting at
La Nouvelle Lune, where he had become the major contributor and acting editor. He became editor in chief on November 30, 1883.
By November 1883, the
IncoherentsThe Incoherents was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as...
had become so big that an exhibit was arranged at the Vivienne Gallery, open to the public. It was called "an exhibition of drawings by people who do not know how to draw." Émile Cohl's contribution was titled
Portrait garanti ressemblant (Portrait--Resemblance Guaranteed). The exhibit accepted any and all entries, so long as they were not obscene or serious. The public was taken with the show, and the profits were donated to public assistance. There was a second show in 1884, and the 1885 show was replaced by a masked ball (Cohl went as an
artichokeA globe artichoke is a partially edible perennial thistle originating in southern Europe around the Mediterranean.Artichoke may also refer to:*Artichoke , a creative company specialising in arts events...
). In 1886, Cohl produced his most bizarre and characteristic work in the Incoherent vein:
Abus des metaphors, a collection of more than a dozen colorful expressions brought to life.
Death of André Gill
Cohl's personal life was nowhere as rosy as his professional life would suggest, despite the birth of his daughter Marcelle Andrée in May 1883. André Gill never recovered his sanity, and after a few months Charenton seized his property and drawings, auctioning them off to pay their bills. Cohl was unable to keep his hero in the public eye. André Gill died on
May DayMay Day occurs on May 1 and refers to several public holidays. In many countries, May Day is synonymous with International Workers' Day, or Labour Day, a day of political demonstrations and celebrations organised by the unions and socialist groups....
, 1885, with only Cohl by his side. Cohl never forgot Gill's desertion by his friends and the public. The
IncoherentThe Incoherents was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as...
movement collapsed in 1888.
After the collapse of his marriage, Cohl moved to
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
to work for
Pick Me Up, a humor magazine that specialized in French artists (he left his long-standing second job as a philatelist at this time). He returned to Paris in June 1896 and married Suzanne Delpy, the daughter of one of André Gill's followers. Their son André Jean was born on November 8, 1899. By this time, Cohl had moved away from caricature, sending humorous drawings to bicycle magazines, family magazines, and children's magazines. He also wrote articles on French history, stamps, and fishing. In July 1898 he started contributing to
L'Illustré National. This would be the origin of Cohl's comic strips. At the same time, Cohl's art moved from scene-setting to story-telling, and from the Gill
fantoche style to
ImpressionismImpressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...
. Other interests during this period included puzzles, toys (he invented a few new ones), and drawings of figures made from wax matches. In the political arena, he submitted anti-
DreyfusThe Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November, 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...
illustrations to
La Libre Parole Illustrée.
Motion pictures
By 1907, the 50-year old Émile Cohl, like everyone else in Paris, had become aware of motion pictures. How he actually entered the business is shrouded in legend. According to Jean-Georges Auriol in a book of 1930, one day Cohl was walking down the street when he spotted a poster advertising a movie obviously stolen from one of his strips. Outraged, he confronted the manager of the offending studio (
GaumontGaumont Film Company is a French film production company founded in 1895 by the engineer-turned-inventor, Léon Gaumont . It is the oldest running film company in the world. Originally dealing in photographic apparatuses, the company began producing short films in 1897 to promote its make of...
) and was hired on the spot as a scenarist (responsible for one-page story ideas for movies). The story is rather doubtful in the detail of which strip and which short film; it is also possible that the story is completely false, and that Cohl was approached for the job, either by director Etienne Arnaud or by artistic director
Louis FeuilladeLouis Feuillade was a prolific and prominent French film director from the silent era. Between 1906 and 1924 he directed over 630 films....
, both of whom had once worked for caricature papers and therefore could be expected to know Cohl by reputation if not personally.
At Gaumont, Cohl collaborated with the other directors whenever possible, learning cinematography from Arnaud and directing chases, comedies,
féeries ("fairy pieces"), and pageants. But his specialty was animation. He worked in a corner of the studio with a vertically-mounted Gaumont camera and a single assistant to operate it. He turned out four sequences a month for insertion in mostly-live action films. Studio director
Léon GaumontLéon Gaumont was a French inventor, engineer, and industrialist who was a pioneer of the motion picture industry....
, in one of his visits, dubbed him "the Benedictine".
The idea for doing animation was born from the huge success of the film "The Haunted Hotel", released by
VitagraphAmerican Vitagraph was a United States movie studio, founded by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith in 1897 and bought by Warner Brothers in 1925.-History:...
and directed by
J. Stuart BlacktonJames Stuart Blackton , usually known as J. Stuart Blackton, was an American film producer of the Silent Era, the founder of Vitagraph Studios and among the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation. He is considered the father of American animation.Blackton was born...
. It premiered in Paris in April 1907 and immediately there was a demand for more films using its incredible object animation techniques. According to a story told by Arnaud in 1922, Gaumont had ordered his staff to figure out the "mystery of 'The Haunted Hotel'." Cohl studied the film frame by frame, and in this way discovered the techniques of animation. It should be noted that Cohl, who was always seeking to enlarge his reputation in later life, never corroborated this story. Also, there were a fair number of films released before 1907 with stop-motion and/or drawn animation in them, by Blackton and others, any one of which could have taught Cohl animation, if he didn't just work the technique out on his own. The only reason "The Haunted Hotel" is significant is the fact that it was popular enough to make the arduous work of animation profitable.
Cohl made "Fantasmagorie" from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film ever made. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a "stream of consciousness" style. It borrowed from Blackton in using a "chalk-line effect" (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton's "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces"). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.
"Fantasmagorie" was released on August 17, 1908. This was followed by two more films, "Le Cauchemar du fantoche" ["The Puppet's Nightmare", now lost] and "Un Drame chez les fantoches" ["A Puppet Drama", called "The Love Affair in Toyland" for American release and "Mystical Love-Making" for British release], all completed in 1908. These three films are united by their chalk-line style, the stick-figure clown protagonists, and the constant transformations. Cohl made the plots of these films up as he was filming them. He would put a drawing on the lightbox, photograph it, trace onto next sheet with slight changes, photograph that, and so on. This meant that the pictures did not jitter and the plot was spontaneous. Cohl had to calculate the timing in advance. The process was demanding and time-consuming, which is probably why he moved away from drawn animation after "Un Drame chez les fantoches".
The rest of the films Cohl made for Gaumont involve strange transformations ("Les Joyeaux Microbes" ["The Joyous Microbes", aka "The Merry Microbes" (UK)] (1909)), some great matte effects ("Clair de lune espagnol" ["Spanish Moonlight", aka "The Man in the Moon" (US), aka "The Moon-Struck Matador" (UK)] (1909)), and loving puppet animation ("Le Tout Petit Faust" ["The Little Faust", aka "The Beautiful Margaret" (US)] (1910)), and "Mobilier fidèle" (1910), released in the U.S. as "The Automatic Moving Company" in 1912. Other films used jointed cut-outs or animated matches (the later an especial favorite of Cohl).
In his lifetime, Cohl's most-famous film was
Le Peintre néo-impressionniste ["The Neo-Impressionistic Painter"], made in 1910. An artist is sketching a classically-draped model holding a broom as a stick-figure when a collector storms in demanding to know the progress of his work. The artist shows the collector a series of blank colored canvases (the film is color-tinted). As he gives their ridiculous titles, the collector imagines them being drawn on the canvas. For example, the red canvas is "a cardinal eating lobster with tomatoes by the banks of the Red Sea". The collector is soon so delirious that he buys every blank canvas he can see. Quite obviously, the artist is not a neo-Impressionist (the name taken from the latest vogue in Paris)--he's an Incoherent.
The Cohl animated films had a large impact through their American distribution by Kleine. Many of them received rave reviews in the trade magazines, although Cohl was only identified as "Gaumont's animator". It was probably in response to "Fantasmagorie" that
Winsor McCayWinsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator.A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades...
made
Little NemoLittle Nemo is the main fictional character in a series of weekly comic strips by Winsor McCay that appeared in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspapers from October 15, 1905 – April 23, 1911 and April 30, 1911 – July 26, 1914; respectively...
(1911). Motifs of Cohl's can be found in
Little Nemo and later films by McCay: the dots coalescing into Little Nemo reflect effects in
Un Drame chez les fantoches and
Les Joyeaux Microbes; the metamorphosis of the rose into the Princess may have been inspired by
Fantasmagorie; the titular character of
The Story of a Mosquito (1912) sharpening his beak comes from
Un Drame chez les fantoches; the live-action/animation interaction of McCay throwing a pumpkin to
Gertie the DinosaurGertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 short animated film by Winsor McCay.Although not the first animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality...
(1914) may have been an answer to the matador hurling his hatchet at the moon in "Clair de lune espagnol". But if there were borrowings of Cohl by McCay, there was also a wealth of style and spirit in McCay's films that were uniquely his own.
On November 30, 1910, Cohl left Gaumont for
PathéThis article deals with the Pathé movie company. For their music business, see Pathé Records.Pathé or Pathé Frères is the name of various French businesses founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France.-History:...
, probably for more money. He made only two animated films before being forced into exclusively live-action work as a director of burlesques starring Jobard (Lucien Cazalis), one of the first generation of great screen comics. Cohl made ten Jobard films between March and May 1911 before leaving for a vacation. Apparently, one of these films was the origin of
pixilationPixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet...
, the technique of applying stop-motion to human beings.
One of those two animated films was "Le Ratapeur de cervelles" ["Brains Repaired"], which is a re-hash of "Les Joyeaux Microbes" using a mental disease. The transformations here are some of the most remarkable (and non-sensical) of Cohl's career: as two men shake hands in profile, their heads expand into huge crossed bird beaks, filling the screen in a zoom until only their shared eye is seen, which itself expands into a bellows. The other film, "La Revanche des espirits" [The Spirit's Revenge] (now lost) may have been the first film to combine live-action and animation by drawing directly on the live-action film (previous work had used mattes exclusively).
In July 1911, Émile Cohl learned that his estranged daughter Andrée had died in an auto accident. Dissatisfied with Pathé and too proud to return to Gaumont, Cohl signed with Eclipse in September. None of Cohl's Eclipse films have survived, so little is known of his work there--it appeared to consist of object animation and travelogues. The Eclipse contract was not exclusive, so Cohl made films for other studios. One of these films, "Campbell Soups", was his first film made for Éclair, the Number Three studio in France.
Éclair's American studio at
Fort Lee, New JerseyFort Lee is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the borough population was 35,461.Fort Lee was formed by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 29, 1904, from the remaining portions of Ridgefield Township. With the creation of Fort Lee,...
was run by Cohl's friend Arnaud. As Éclair was moving into comedies for American audiences, it was not too hard for Arnaud to have his friend sent over the Atlantic to join him. Émile, his wife Suzanne, and their son André sailed first class from La Havre to
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
. At
Ellis IslandEllis Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, is the location of what was from January 1, 1892, until November 12, 1954 the main entry facility for immigrants entering the United States; the facility replaced the state-run Castle Garden Immigration Depot in Manhattan...
, he was required, for "sanitary reasons", to shave off the mustache he had worn for thirty years in honor of André Gill.
Despite the inevitable
xenophobiaXenophobia is a dislike and/or fear of that which is unknown or different from oneself. It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear." The term is typically used to describe a fear or dislike of foreigners or of people significantly different from...
from the locals, the French colony at Fort Lee was enthusiastic about finally invading the coveted American market. Cohl bought a house and settled into a typical middle-class American lifestyle. He had a considerable advantage over fellow-Éclair employees, as he was fluent in English.
Cohl had two basic assignments at Fort Lee: humorous newsreel inserts and
The Newlyweds animated series. The newsreel (one of the first of its kind) was started by the Sales Company in March 1912 and continued by
UniversalUniversal Studios , a subsidiary of NBC Universal, is one of the six major American movie studios. Its main motion picture production/distribution arm is called Universal Pictures. Its production studios are located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California...
(Éclair's distributor).
The Newlyweds started life as a newspaper comic strip by George McManus in the New York
World. The three main characters are a fashionable woman drawn in the style of the "
Gibson GirlThe Gibson Girl was the personification of a feminine ideal as portrayed in the satirical pen and ink illustrated stories created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson during a 20-year period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States.Some people argue that the...
", her obliging husband, and Baby Snookums, an absolute hellion of a child who nevertheless gets everything he wants (usually at the expense of the father). The series was popular both in the United States and in France (under the name
Le Petit Ange). Cohl wanted to make the first animated series, and he liked
The Newlyweds. As for McManus, he may have been convinced to sign with Cohl at the urging of his friend Winsor McCay. Prior to this point, there had been a few adaptations of comic series into films, but they were all live action. Examples include
Happy HooliganHappy Hooligan was a popular and influential early American comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper.Happy Hooligan, the first major comic strip by already celebrated cartoonist Opper, debuted with a Sunday strip on March 11 1900 in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and was one of the first...
(starring J. Stuart Blackton as the title character),
Buster BrownBuster Brown was a comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard Felton Outcault which was known for his association with the Brown Shoe Company. This mischievous young boy was loosely based on a boy near Outcault's home in Flushing, New York...
, and
Mutt and Jeff (later to become a successful animated series).
Cohl began work on
The Newlyweds series in November 1912, and the ads started appearing in February 1913. These ads are the oldest on record to use the phrase "animated cartoons"; as would be usual for all of the following comic adaptations, only the comic artist is mentioned in the advertising, never the animator. Cohl achieved his speed (thirteen
Newlyweds cartoons in thirteen months) by using the bare minimum of actual animation, the scenes consisting of static tableau with dialog balloons appearing above each character's head (done faithfully in the McManus style). What little motion necessary was done with hinged cut-out figures animated by stop-motion. The only ingenuity in these films lay in the transitions between tableaux, which utilized Cohl's trademark transformations. Nevertheless, Cohl had proved that commercial animation was possible. The series was an instant hit. Only one film in this series has survived, "He Poses for His Portrait" [aka "Le Portrait de Zozor" (Fr.)] (1913).
The success of the series led to an explosion of animation, all adaptations of comic strips, and few of them remembered today. Meanwhile, Cohl saw both "The Story of a Mosquito" and "Gertie the Dinosaur" live at the Hammerstein Theater in New York, and he recorded his admiration of each in his diary. For animation to be practical, it had to move beyond the techniques of Cohl (cut-outs) and McCay (tracing), both of which were arduous, single-person processes. Two men were to independently work out ways around this problem:
Raoul BarréRaoul Barré was a Canadian and American cartoonist, animator of the silent film era, and artist.Barré was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only artistic child of an importer of communion wine...
and Randolph Bray. Barré studied art in Paris in the 1890s and was known for his pro-Dreyfus cartoons. In 1920, Cohl told the story of two unnamed visitors that Éclair had forced on him to study his techniques, techniques that they later stole to make their own series. It is possible that these two were Barré and his business partner
William C. NolanBill Nolan is a former Australian rules footballer who played with Richmond. He was killed in World War I.-Sources:*Holmesby, Russell & Main, Jim . The Encyclopedia of AFL Footballers. 7th ed. Melbourne: Bas Publishing....
. It is possible that Cohl's obvious hostility to his visitors was the result of the knowledge that they were on opposite sides in the Dreyfus Affair. On the other hand, Barré's method for making cartoons quickly, the "slash system", is the exact opposite of Cohl's cut-out system. It is true that Barré's series,
The Animated Grouch Chasers, frequently stole characters and scenarios from Cohl, but then again everyone was doing that. Randolph Bray, in collaboration with Earl Hurd, developed the patents that nearly made them the
Motion Picture Patents CompanyThe Motion Picture Patents Company , founded in December 1908, was a trust of all the major American film companies , the leading distributor and the biggest supplier of raw film, Eastman Kodak...
of animated film. Animation historian Michael Barrier speculates that one of Cohl's unnamed visitors may have been Bray instead of Barré.
World War I
On March 11, 1914, the Cohl family left New Jersey for Paris in response to a death in Suzanne's family. They never returned. Eight days later, a fire destroyed most of Éclair's American films, including all but two of Cohl's films ("He Poses for His Portrait" and "Bewitched Matches" [aka "Les Allumettes ensorcelées" (Fr.)]). The later is the only one of the animated matches films Cohl made to survive. The American studio later moved to
Tucson, ArizonaTucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States, located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. As of July 1, 2006, a Census Bureau estimate puts the city's population at 541,811, with a metropolitan area population at...
. The chaos caused by the fire brought Éclair's work in France to a near-standstill. Cohl made a handful of films for Éclair in France, but the outbreak of
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
on August 3, 1914 forced those films to be held back for years before being released.
By August 11, 80% of the French film industry had enlisted or had been drafted. Cohl (at 57 years of age) was too old to fight, but he volunteered as best he could while working at Éclair. His heart was no longer in his work, for his beloved wife Suzanne was slowly dying. In 1916, American cartoons took France by storm. Gaumont imported
The Animated Grouch Chasers and for the first time since the early films of Blackton, animated films were being advertised with the name and face of their animator, Raoul Barré. If Barré is the individual who "stole" Cohl's techniques, this must have made him furious (it didn't help that it was his former employer that was doing all the hoopla).
It was at this moment that Cohl was approached by Benjamin Rabier, a popular illustrator of children's books. Rabier wanted Cohl to animate his characters. The producer for the series was René Navarre, a former actor who had become famous playing the anti-hero
FantomasFantômas is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre .One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fantômas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11...
in a series of films in 1913 and 1914. The distributor was Agence Générale Cinematographique (AGC). The trio parted company over Cohl's resentment that he was not being credited in the advertising. The series,
Les Dessins animés de Benjamin Rabier (
The Animated Drawings of Benjamin Rabier) starred Flambeau the War Dog. The only surviving film, "Les Fiançailles de Flambeau" ["Flambeau's Wedding"] (released 1917) has cute naturalistic characters from Rabier and coarse morbid humor from Cohl. By the time of Cohl's departure, Rabier had learned enough animation to carry on with the help of two assistants. The series lasted for several years.
Cohl continued work with Éclair throughout this debacle, mostly making newsreel inserts. Based on the few fragments that remain, the series
Les Aventures des Pieds Nickelés [
Adventures of the Leadfoot Gang] may have been the best work of Cohl's career. It was based on a working class comic strip by Louis Forton, about a gang of anarchistic youngsters constantly getting into trouble with both the criminal underground and the law. The series was terminated by the war, as the Éclair-Journal studios were occupied to make American war propaganda.
Cohl spent the rest of the war serving his country. He joined the United States Air Service Supply as a volunteer on May 11, 1918. His son André had joined the American Transportation Division the previous November.
With the war over, Cohl quit Éclair in May 1920 and made his last significant film, "Fantoche cherche un logement" ["Puppet Looks for an Apartment"]. It was released as "La Maison du fantoche" ["Puppet's Mansion"] in April 1921 by AGC. The only notice paid to it in the trade journals was a one-line plot summary. Nobody cared about Cohl's work anymore, or any other French filmmaker, for that matter. Cohl's career was finished, since there was no longer any way to justify the cost of an animated short subject in a world of live-action features.
Cohl died in 1938. His ashes are kept in the columbarium of the
Père-Lachaise CemeteryPère Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France at , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs....
, in Paris.
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