Fantasmagorie — the Metamorphosis

A stick-figure clown meets an elephant, and the elephant will not hold still. It stretches, folds, becomes something else, the way nearly everything in this film becomes something else. Emile Cohl drew Fantasmagorie in 1908 as a stream of white chalk-line figures on black, some seven hundred drawings shot a frame at a time, and it is usually called the first fully animated film. There is barely a plot. A shape turns into a bottle turns into a flower turns into a man, transformation for its own delight. That constant morphing is exactly the logic a comic runs on when it asks you to read one drawing into the next. Cohl came up through caricature and the Incoherents, the Paris pranksters who staged nonsense art shows, and the whole film keeps their spirit: a drawing that refuses to sit still.