Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

The artist's hand and a blackboard..a quick sketch of a face..another face, a cigar, a cloud of smoke, and suddenly, a whole new art form is born. No genius here, absolutely terrible drawing, but it's the first one as far as we know, and deserves a bit of credit just for that..Melies did stop motion first, and there were hundreds of flip books using the persistence of vision to animate line drawings before this silly little strip of celluloid came along. Nonetheless, everyone who has ever enjoyed a Tex Avery or Disney cartoon should know the humble origins of the form, and this is one example.

This film is highly reminiscent of some of the films by Georges Méliès because of the film's extensive use of trick cinematography--an art perfected by Méliès before the director of this film got his start. In fact, the Méliès short THE UNTAMABLE WHISKERS (1904) is an awful lot like this film except instead of just having cartoons come to life due to stop-motion, this earlier film features Georges Méliès himself interacting with the drawings. Both are pretty antiquated by today's standards, but because they are short and pretty creative, they are also both very watchable. This J. Stuart Blackton film isn't quite as good or innovative, but this shouldn't stop you from giving it a look on google video.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)

*** (out of 4)

When viewing this animated short people must remember that it was made even before D.W. Griffith started making pictures! This three minute film basically has chalk drawings coming to life in front of our eyes. The animation technology certainly grew as time went along but I can't see how anyone could watch this and not be impressed with what they were doing. The trick photography is really impressive and I also thought the drawings were extremely good. I really liked the first man and woman and how the man's smoke was used to cover up the woman. This is certainly a very early use of animation and it looks extremely well.

I was amazed by 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces', a short film that combines animation with live-action, although the live action part is only a visible hand drawing the animations. The hand belongs to J. Stuart Blackton, both animator and director of this little film.

On screen we see a chalkboard where a hand draws a man. Next to him a woman appears in the same style, but now the hand is not drawing it. Then the man changes his face numerous time, or actually I should say, the animator does. This part ends with the man smoking his pipe, covering the woman in a lot of smoke (or chalk). After this Blackton throws in some experimental little things: figures slowly erased from the chalk board, a moving clown and his dog, the live-action hand who wipes out the clown, but not before he has put his hat back on his head.

Highly enjoyable and an important film in the process of animation, this one should not be missed!

And here I am. Still reviewing some key examples of early animation on celluloid. Today, I decided to focus on another more recognized work from film genius James Stuart Blackton, the renowned Father of Animation, which I find much more elaborated, but equally effective, than his previous work on animation: the remarkable "The Enchanted Drawing".

"Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" not only is as captivating as the aforementioned film, but it also nearly surpasses it, especially considering the creativity that Blackton put in the drawings, in which new techniques already used still shine in this one, such as cut-out and stop-motion, this time used in a more natural and fluid way, helping to bring a new level of realism to their creations.

As if that were not enough, this time we do not see Blackton in person, but only his hands, giving the drawings the absolute protagonism.

The effort and dedication that was put to make this short is indeed admirable, besides being a meaningful contribution to the development of animation in film, in a time when it was developed slowly, until it became what we know today.