A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from the French caricaturist, cartoonist and animator Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie. Made in 1908, this hand-drawn animation is considered by many film historians to be the very first animated cartoon. Despite appearances it is not created on a blackboard but rather on paper, the blackboard effect achieved by shooting each of the 700 drawings onto negative film. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images on to surrounding walls.

You can see the full film featured in our Films collection here.

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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter

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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.