Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl (actually Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet ; born January 4, 1857 in Paris , † January 20, 1938 in Villejuif , Val-de-Marne ) was a French cartoonist and animation filmmaker . He was the first animator in Europe.
Life
His mother died when he was seven years old; after that he grew up mainly in boarding schools. During the siege of Paris in 1870/71 he discovered the Guignol puppet theater ( marionettes ) and political caricature for himself. At the age of 15, at the insistence of his father, he began training as a jeweler, but ended up living as a drawing bohemian .
In 1878 Émile Cohl came into contact with André Gill , the most famous caricaturist at the time and editor of a political satirical newspaper, and worked with him for about a year as an assistant, adopting his caricature style of oversized, concise heads. At this time, Courtet took the pseudonym "Émile Cohl". In 1879 he was briefly imprisoned for political caricatures of President Patrice de Mac-Mahon and then worked with the artist group Les Hydropathes , then until 1888 with the Incoherents as a satirist and publisher.
Cohl married in 1881; his wife later left him for an author despite having a daughter. After his marriage broke up, Cohl went to London until 1896 and worked for the humorous magazine Pick Me Up . After his return he entered into a second marriage and had a son in 1899. Since 1898 Cohl drew comic strips for L'Illustré National ; he developed his work from individual scenes to illustrated stories.
.GIF)
Around 1907 he began to work for the film production company Gaumont . He learned the cinematic craft from other employed directors, but his profession was the production of short animated films . The idea for this came from the great success of The Haunted Hotel , a stop-motion animated Vitagraph film by James Stuart Blackton , which premiered in Paris in April 1907. Cohl's first animated film Fantasmagorie, made in 1908 and running for 2 minutes, consists of around 700 drawings and is considered the first exclusively animated film. To do this, Cohl drew the individual images with a black pen and later projected the negative film, creating an effect of drawing like with white chalk on a black board. The film premiered on August 17, 1908 in Paris. His simple little characters, drawn with just a few strokes, in this and the following two films in the same style, he called “Fantoches”. However, because of the time it took to produce these films, Cohl initially turned to other forms of animation.
Using stop-motion technology, he created “transformation” films in the style of Georges Méliès , but also puppet cartoons and semi-animated short films. His most famous film was Le Peintre neo-impressionniste from 1910, which is colored in single frames. Cohl's films were also successful in the US even before Winsor McCay created his Little Nemo in 1911 . McCay let himself be influenced in this and his other films by the style of Émile Cohl.
In December 1910, Cohl moved from Gaumont to Pathé , where he was only able to make two animated films. Then he was a director of real films . In 1911 he made ten burlesque comedies with the main character Jobard (Lucien Cazalis). One of these films, Jobard ne peut pas voir les femmes travailler , is the first known film to use the technique of pixilation .
Disappointed in Pathé and too proud to return to Gaumont, Cohl switched to the film company Eclipse. Little is known of his work there today, and only very few of his films of this time have survived. Cohl's friend Arnaud finally brought him to the American studios of the French film company Éclair in New York in 1912 . There he worked for the newsreels and the cinematic implementation of the comic strip The Newlyweds by George McManus as an animated film series. In the announcements for this, the term "animated cartoons" appeared for the first time and they established the convention of all subsequent comic adaptations that only the name of the cartoonist and not that of the animator is mentioned in the opening credits . Only one of the films in this series still exists today. The success of The Newlyweds marked the start of a wave of animation productions, including Winsor McCay's classics The Story of a Mosquito and Gertie the Dinosaur .
In March 1914, Cohl and his family went to Paris from New Jersey and stayed there because a fire destroyed the Éclair studios in America shortly after his departure. With the exception of the two films He Poses for His Portrait and Bewitched Matches, all of Cohl's American works for this company were destroyed. From the end of 1914, Cohl's techniques were further developed by John Randolph Bray's newly founded Bray Productions , the first exclusively animated film studio .
During the First World War, French film production was paralyzed and Gaumont imported American cartoons. In 1916, American productions dominated the French market, and for the first time since the early days of James Stuart Blacktons, animated films were advertised under the name of the animator, Raoul Barré . At the same time, Cohl was to animate the characters for the children's book illustrator Benjamin Rabier, and the Fantômas actor René Navarre was won over as producer . The trio broke up in an argument as Cohl was upset about not mentioning his name in the movie advertisements. From this series only the strip Les Fiançailles de Flambeau , published in 1917, still exists today . At the same time, Cohl created the series Les Aventures des Pieds Nickelés for Éclair , a series of animated films about an anarchist youth gang who is constantly in conflict with underground criminals and the law. It was discontinued due to the war. In 1920 Émile Cohl made his last film and quit his job at Éclair. That ended his career.
Émile Cohl is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
Filmography
Director
|
|
literature
- Rolf Giesen : Emile Cohl . In ders .: Lexicon of cartoons and animated films. From Aladdin, Akira and Sindbad to Shrek, Spider-Man and South Park. Films and characters, series and artists, studios and technology - the great world of animated films . Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89602-523-6 , pp. 96-103.
Web links
- Émile Cohl in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- biography
- YouTube: "Fantasmagorie", the world's first cartoon (1:17 min)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Gaumont collection - Le cinéma premier 2 , published in 2009 , which also contains two DVDs with almost 5 hours of his works, includes Les exploits de Feu Follet and Les métamorphoses comiques .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cohl, Émile |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French caricaturist and animator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 4, 1857 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 20, 1938 |
| Place of death | Villejuif , Val-de-Marne department , France |