What was the very first cartoon? The very first cartoon in the world

It's hard to imagine a child who has never watched cartoons. These fun and colorful movies for kids will keep them glued to the screen. Even adults sometimes don’t mind going back to their childhood and watching a cartoon. Bright, colorful, musical, kind. However, we are so accustomed to the widespread popularity of cartoons that few people can name the very first cartoon in the world. And when did he come out?

The first cartoon in the world

Experts in the history of cartoons still cannot make up their minds and decide which animated film awarded the title of the very first in the world. The championship laurels are shared by three films: two works by James Stewart Blackton, published in 1906 and 1907 (“The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” and “The Haunted Hotel”) and Emil Cohl’s work “Phantasmagoria,” released in 1908.

Shortly before the start of the 20th century, James Stewart Blackton and Thomas Edison created an animated film. These were moving drawings captured on film. Thus, it turned out that the “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” combined cinema and graphics. The picture was first released to French audiences in 1906. And a year later, Blackton showed the world his second picture - “Hotel with Haunted Mans.” However, both of these cartoons were far from the modern understanding of the cartoon and did not show all the possibilities of the animation technique, which at that time was called the “American Movement”.

Scientists are inclined to believe that Emil Kohl’s “Phantasmagoria,” which was released in 1908, can be considered the first full-fledged cartoon. It was a full-fledged animated film, drawn on white paper and filmed in negative. The picture lasted exactly one and a half minutes. Scientists also note the unusual effect that is achieved by combining light lines on a dark background.

The very first cartoon in Russian animation

The right of the first Russian animator rightfully belongs to the biologist Vladislav Starevich. He was working on studying the life of insects and was going to make a film about how two male stag beetles fight for a female. However, Starevich encountered a problem: as soon as the beetles were exposed to light suitable for filming, they became passive. Then the biologist-animator found a solution to the problem: he attached thin wires to the legs of the pared beetles with wax and filmed the entire scene frame by frame. This is how the first film based on animation appeared in Russia. By the way, until this moment no one in the world had thought of doing this.

A few years later, Vladislav Starevich introduced Russia and the world short film about beetles “Beautiful Lyukanida, or the War of the Longhorned Hornbills with the Horned Hornbills.” The whole world has long admired how beetles can be trained and an entire film can be created.

People have always been imaginative. They were able to revive inanimate objects (images) using special techniques for the first time more than a hundred years ago.

Modern animation includes several types, styles and methods of film creation. Each country has its own cartoon characters and its own unique story development of animated films.

In 1924 the first appears soviet cartoon, filmed by documentary director David Abelevich Kaufman (Dziga Vertov). This is not a children's entertainment cartoon. Shown here in 10 minutes with the help of a drawing that seems primitive at first glance is the history of the formation of the USSR. Movie title " Soviet toys" The film was shot at Goskino. What’s interesting is that at the end of the cartoon they offer to create an advertisement.

The main heroes of that time were the people, workers, peasants, Red Army soldiers, the proletariat and, of course, those with whom they had to fight. Well-fed, arrogant bourgeois, priests (church) and tavern entertainment (dancer). Constantly changing music background, conveying the change of events and mood in the cartoon. In the end, it all ended with a New Year tree and fireworks - this is a sign that it has begun new life. Instead of toys, the Red Army soldiers hung all their enemies on the Christmas tree.

The first Soviet cartoons had more political overtones, being a means of propaganda.

The very first cartoon in Russia for kids

The first surviving cartoon for children is "The Rink". The film was shot by the director, founder of the school of Soviet animation, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, based on Chukovsky’s fairy tale “Senka the African.”

This is also a silent, musical, hand-drawn film. Main plot- is brave little boy in Budenovka, who defeats the fat man “bourgeois” and rushes to the aid of the figure skater.

In 1913, Vladislav Starevich filmed a black-and-white, musical with subtitles, puppet cartoon “The Dragonfly and the Ant.” His grandiose global success took place in Russian Empire. This film was intended for both young and older viewers. The plot of Krylov's fable was taken as a basis; the duration of the cartoon was 4 minutes.

In Moscow, 1936 (June 10), the largest Russian studio “Soyuzdetmultfilm” was created and began its work. Children's animated films are beginning to be created. The first film was hand-drawn, black and white, released at the studio, it was in the genre of children's comedy and was called “It's Hot in Africa.” The adventure of the animals is described here.

Also in 1936, the first Russian color cartoon was released at the Mosfilm film studio, under the direction of director Sarra Mokil. This is a three-color puppet, musical, voice-over film-fairy tale “The Fox and the Wolf”, based on a Russian fairy tale. Duration 18 minutes.

Walt Disney's very first cartoon in America

In 1924 (March 1) - Disney presented its audience with the cartoon “Alice's Day at Sea,” which subsequently opened a whole series of 56 episodes about Alice’s adventures.

But this is a slightly different story - “Alice in Animation Land”. Used here comedy genre. Combining cinema and cartoon (Alice is a living character) - Walt places the heroine in a drawn world. The duration of the cartoon is 12 minutes. Little Alice and her dog friend decided to take a walk to the sea. There they met the captain, who told Alice about his sea adventures.

The tired girl decided to take a nap in an empty boat; on the shore she dreamed that she was falling on the seabed. On her way, Alice meets many sea inhabitants who are cartoon characters. This is a light children's story in a cartoon with captions and musical accompaniment. He wasn't too popular. These were the first works of the great animator.

When did the oldest (anime) cartoon in the world come out?

Anime is a part of Japanese culture and is very popular among children, teenagers and adults in many countries around the world. Cartoons of this style are produced in different genres. Unfortunately, the author who created the oldest Japanese anime in 1907 has not been identified. It was assembled from hand-drawn pictures. The moving boy spells out the word “cinema” from hieroglyphs and takes off his hat to the audience. The duration of this anime is 3 seconds.

Manga is considered the predecessor of anime. This word appeared in 1814 thanks to the artist Katsushika Hokusai. These are black and white sketches drawn in ink. Stories in pictures, later comics. "Marumaru Timbun" - the magazine first published comics on Japanese with a European accent in 1877.

Many consider the pioneer in Japanese anime to be Dekoten Shimokawa, who in 1917 made sketches on a blackboard using chalk and tried to revive them by recording them on film. His works have not survived. The first films were no more than 1-5 minutes long; they were created by (single) artists, trying to apply the existing knowledge, experience and techniques of Western animators.

Namakura Gatana (created June 30, 1917) is considered one of the first black and white anime. This small, two-minute cartoon was created at the Japanese studio Kobayashi Shokai. The name is translated as “Dull Samurai Sword.” This film is about the incompetence of a samurai who bought a dull sword. Then, to avenge his humiliation, he returned to the seller to resolve the conflict.

One of the first animes is a film - a fairy tale about a crab and a monkey, who are also fabulous samurai. The plot of the film is to take revenge on the vile monkey. The monkey betrayed the crab. The children of the killed crab take revenge and kill the monkey. This cartoon, called “How the crab took revenge on the monkey”, was staged according to the old Japanese fairy tale and has a certain meaning.

Every animator at the rise of Japanese cartoon culture contributed to the emergence of various directions and styles Japanese anime. Even big eyes Disney heroes will subsequently prevail over Japanese anime heroes. Only since 1958 has anime been officially recognized in art.

If we talk not only about Japan, then there is a controversial opinion that the very first European cartoon was created and filmed using an Edison camera by Blackton in 1906 “Comic Phases of Funny Faces”.

Drawn by French cartoonist Emile Colas. It was called "Phantasmagoria". It took 700 drawings made on a white paper background with black lines. All this was reprinted onto the negative, giving the effect of a chalk drawing.

What is the first color cartoon in history?

In 1933, the first color hand-drawn picture was created. animated film from the cartoon series “Merry Symphonies”, this film was called “Flowers and Trees”. This is a bright three-color, emotional children's cartoon about the inhabitants of the forest, with synchronized musical scoring. Beautiful, melodic music was used famous composer Schubert.

The duration of the film is 7.5 minutes. This short film won an Oscar best cartoon of that time.

Wikipedia about the first cartoons in the world

All possible surviving information in the history of the development of world animation can be traced on Wikipedia. Here you will find a statement that primitive animation techniques were discovered in primitive era, thanks to wall images that were painted in a certain sequence. From the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century, technology began to develop rapidly, allowing the quality of cartoons to quickly improve.

The Frenchman Emile Renault, an artist and inventor, the son of a watchmaker, was in constant search of improving the apparatus (zoetrope) for viewing moving pictures. And in 1877 in Paris he creates a praxinoscope. Using permanent picture backdrops for the first time and adding synchronized music, his pictures come to life in fluid action. He patented this device and therefore August 30, 1877 is considered the birthday of the first hand-drawn animation in the world.

The first animated heroes of cinematography were not endowed special qualities. These were simply moving pictures that could attract the viewer's attention. In 1914, total animation was used for the cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur. Creator of graphic animation, cartoonist, artist - Winsor McCay, also an American citizen, was the man who created special directions, techniques that influenced the development of world animation. The dinosaur character he created using a drawing (contour) is for the first time endowed with emotions and character.

The very first cartoon in the world is believed to have been shown in 1906 and was called “The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”.

American James Stewart Blackton prepared a small series of drawings and, together with famous inventor Thomas Edison filmed them one by one, calling his creation a “magical animated drawing.”

A year later, Blackton made the film “The Magic Fountain Pen,” where, in front of astonished moviegoers, a fountain pen, uncontrolled by anyone, drew certain figures on paper. Another film, The Haunted Hotel, was shown to audiences in Paris in 1906 and became instantly popular because it depicted moving inanimate objects.

It's interesting that last movie became the subject of careful study for a whole group of French cameramen who were never able to unravel the simple principle of time-lapse photography and called this incomprehensible effect “American movement”.

In the Soviet Union, the very first cartoon was created and shown in 1924. Director Dziga Vertov and animators A. Ivanov and A. Bushkin made the animation “Soviet Toys”. Despite children's name, its plot was purely propaganda. It depicted a fat bourgeois leading a hearty and have a fun life until the workers and Red Army soldiers came and ripped open his stomach. And the coins that fell from the bourgeoisie were simply taken to the people's bank.

The first Soviet cartoon “Soviet toys”, 1924.

In their cartoons, director Dziga Vertov and his colleagues used the principle of frame-by-frame filming of flat puppets, which was much easier than drawing hundreds of individual drawings. Thanks to a new approach soviet animation received rapid development— annually creating several, and then several dozen films at once.

First world recognition Animators of the USSR received thanks to the film “The New Gulliver” released in 1935, which showed the first animated film adaptation famous novel Jonathan Swift, but with an adjusted communist slant. The film combined the principles of doll animation and filming of actors, in particular Gulliver, who for some reason happened to be wearing a Soviet pioneer tie.

However, it should be recognized that the first foundations of the principle of animation were laid more than a thousand years ago. The famous Roman philosopher, poet and Lucretius, in his treatise “On the Nature of Things,” was the first to give a detailed technical description of a device with which one can highlight drawings one by one.

Of course, for that time there were no enthusiasts capable of comprehending ideas that seemed so incredible. And Lucretius himself, apparently, simply did not have enough time to practical application their inventions.

Cartoon “New Gulliver”, USSR, 1935.

There are few adults or children who do not like watching cartoons. Now there are countless of them: from cute and very funny to sad and philosophical, from hand-drawn and “plasticine” to those made using computer or sand animation. But what was the very first cartoon in the world? And who created it?

First puppet film

The oldest cartoon featuring puppets was made in 1898 by James Stewart Blackton and Albert Smith. It's called "Circus of Lilliputians". The toys in it were wooden.

The Father of European Animation

The first European cartoon, called Phantasmagoria, was created in France in 1908 by cartoonist Emile Cohl. In 1908, he joined the Gaumont film company as a photographer and screenwriter, but then moved on to making animated films. Kohl made many films (over 250) using drawings, cutouts and dolls.

The very first cartoon in the history of Europe is also the first fully animated film in the history of animation. Phantasmagoria is French word, which means “a constantly changing complex sequence of what is seen or depicted.” Kohl worked on this cartoon for about 5 months. He drew each frame on paper, which he then transferred to negative film. For this cartoon, which takes about a minute and 20 seconds, the artist had to make about 700 sketches, which he later photographed.

A characteristic feature of Phantasmagoria is that its characters are drawn with white lines and move against a black background.

Each drawing is only slightly different from the previous one. In the process of creating the cartoon, the author allowed himself some spontaneity with the images - that is why “Phantasmagoria” has a “stream of consciousness” style.

The plot of "Phantasmagoria"

The film has no real story or structures. In the first scene, a hand draws the little clown Fantosh hanging on the horizontal bar.

- He falls and is replaced by a fat Fantosh in a hat, who takes off his hat, loses his wig and takes a seat in the cinema.

– A woman in a large hat sits in front of him, because of which Fantosh does not see what is happening on the screen.

– He takes the feathers off his hat and is frightened by a spider that suddenly appears.

– Now you can see the screen better, but the lady has a huge hairstyle under her hat, and Fantosh has to burn it.

– The lady’s head explodes, and Fantosh appears from it.

“Then he falls into a box on which weights are thrown on top, but Fantosh easily opens it, dropping the weights to the ground.

– Using a fishing rod, he catches a passerby, who turns into some kind of liquid.

– Then a huge musketeer appears, and Fantosh burns him with candles.

– While walking around the city, a clown loses his head, it jumps like a ball and is caught by a passerby.

- He turns into a bottle, and Fantosh ends up inside this bottle.

– After this, the bottle turns into a flower, then into an elephant’s trunk.

– Having noticed the policeman, the elephant becomes a house, into which Fantosh runs, and the policeman locks the door from the outside.

– Fantosh decides to jump out of the window and “breaks.” Then the animator’s hands appear, “fixing” the clown, he puffs up and, mounting a horse, disappears.

First cartoon in the USA

In 1906, James Stewart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph Company of America, presented the cartoon " funny faces" It was a series of simple drawings that depicted funny faces.

The first American cartoon character to appear in a short film was Colonel Heise Lear. He made his debut in 1913 in a cartoon by JR Bray called Colonel Hayes Liar in Africa. .

The first three-dimensional cartoon

The first animated film in the world, in which the audience could see volume, was created by Russian director and cameraman Vladislav Starevich in 1912. It was called “Beautiful Lyukanida, or the War of the Barbels with the Horned Horns.”

The cartoon was shot using time-lapse photography, and its main characters were real living insects from Starevich's entomological collection.

The plot of the cartoon told the story of the love of Lyukanida, the mistress of the stag beetles, and Count Heros, a representative of the longhorn beetle tribe.

The film was a wild success among viewers. Knowing well the habits of insects and using the method of time-lapse photography, Starevich achieved natural plasticity of the “actors” in his film.

The history of cinema is truly interesting, because in our time, modern high-tech special effects work real miracles: films amaze with their believability so much that viewers literally feel themselves during the events of the film! However, this was not always the case, and in order to achieve the results that each of us sees in the cinema now, people in the arts have been striving for this for decades. We invite you to take a look at where it all began!

THE VERY FIRST FILM IN THE WORLD - 1895

The beginning of the cinematic era was marked by this short documentary film, which was shot by the Lumiere brothers, called " Arrival of the train at La Ciotat station". Since then, Auguste Louis Marie Nicolas and Louis Jean have been considered the founders of cinema. Despite the simple plot, the picture shocked everyone, because before that people could not imagine that sitting in the room in front of them a real carriage train would pass.

French director Georges Méliès.

THE VERY FIRST HORROR FILM IN THE WORLD - 1896

It is difficult to surprise a modern viewer, much less frighten him, because he has already been spoiled. But there’s a first time for everything, just like the first “horror” movie on the planet. Of course, now the special effects of the 19th century look funny: people appear and disappear in clouds of smoke, and bats suddenly flutter out from behind the edge of the scenery, but precisely "Devil's Castle" officially considered the world's number one horror story.

American cartoonist Stuart Blackton.

THE VERY FIRST CARTOON IN THE WORLD No. 1 - 1906

And two contenders are competing for the title of the very first cartoon in the world: Stuart Blackton and Emil Kolya. In general, the very first was precisely " Humorous phases of funny faces", where the characters come to life with the help of the artist’s hand - it was shown to the public already in 1906 in France.

THE VERY FIRST CARTOON IN THE WORLD No. 2 - 1908

Despite the top multimedia film, scientists recognized the painting " Phantasmagoria" the very first full-fledged hand-drawn cartoon in history. During the creation of a 1.5-minute cartoon, 700 drawings were required!

Directed by Alan Crosland. USA.

THE VERY FIRST FILM IN THE WORLD WITH SOUND - 1927

Musical film "The Jazz Singer" became the first feature-length film in history with sound, which means that it was in 1927 that the era of silent films ended. 88 minutes long, its creation required a huge amount of money at that time, 422 thousand dollars.

Director: Dziga Vertov. USSR.

THE VERY FIRST CARTOON IN RUSSIA - 1924

The first animated film in Russia "Soviet toys", was created as propaganda for the Soviet system. The leading roles are played by an overeating and morally decaying bourgeois, whose belly is full of money, but in the end there is a happy ending for everyone: a Red Army soldier appears, and all the proletarians formed christmas tree, on which the enemies of Soviet society hung in the form of toys...

Armenian director Ruben Mamulyan.

OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED THE VERY FIRST COLOR FILM IN THE WORLD - 1935

Surprisingly, color cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers (they colored each frame by hand), then in 1902 the film “Traveling to the Moon” was released, where green and red tones appeared in several frames; in 1917 and 1922, the first films of Herbert Calamus, the founder of Technicolor company and the founder of color cinematography, 1925 USSR film "Battleship Potemkin" with splashes of red..

But apparently scientists found out about this too late, but because "Becky Sharp" 1935 is officially recognized as the very first color film in the world.

Walt Disney Company.

THE VERY FIRST DISNEY CARTOON - MARCH 1, 1924

The very first cartoon of the legendary and beloved Disney animation studio was the debut "Alice's Day at Sea", based on Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland. By the way, even now the picture is interesting to watch.