Which Studio Produced The First Cartoon Ever Made?

I get a real kick out of digging into film history, and this question always opens up a fun little debate. If you’re asking which studio produced what many film historians call the first animated film, I point at the American Vitagraph Company. In 1906 J. Stuart Blackton made 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' while working with Vitagraph, and that short is often credited as the earliest example of drawn animation captured on film. Blackton’s technique mixed stop-motion, chalk drawings, and frame-by-frame trickery — it’s rough by modern standards but wildly inventive for its time. It wasn’t a polished cartoon character with consistent model sheets, but it established animation as a film technique rather than just a stage trick.

That said, I always like to contrast that with what people mean when they say “first cartoon.” If you insist on the first fully hand-drawn sequence that looks like what we now think of as a cartoon, then Émile Cohl’s 'Fantasmagorie' from 1908 is the usual pick. Cohl was working in France, experimenting with hand-drawn figures that morph and glide across a surreal, looping landscape. It’s only about a minute long, but its style — little stick-and-ink transformations — reads as the first true example of drawn animation as an art form. Neither of these early films came from a massive studio system the way we picture Disney decades later. Instead they came from small film companies and independent pioneers tinkering with new possibilities.

So, when someone asks “which studio produced the first cartoon ever made?” I’ll answer with a little nuance: the American Vitagraph Company produced the earliest surviving drawn-animation film by Blackton in 1906, and Émile Cohl’s 1908 work in France is often celebrated as the first fully hand-drawn cartoon. Both are predecessors of the studio-driven animation era that followed — Bray Studios and then Disney industrialized the craft — but those very early films retain a charming, experimental spirit that still makes me smile.

I like to keep things short and clear when people want a direct response, and the truth is a bit split. If you mean the first filmed animation, that credit usually goes to the American Vitagraph Company, because J. Stuart Blackton’s 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' (1906) was produced there and is widely cited as the earliest surviving drawn animation on film. If you mean the first fully hand-drawn cartoon in the style we’d recognize today, then Émile Cohl’s 'Fantasmagorie' (1908), created in France, is the common pick — a short, surreal sequence that looks like the ancestor of modern cartoons.

So it depends on your definition: Vitagraph gets the nod for the earliest filmed trick-animation, while Cohl’s work gets credit for the first complete hand-drawn cartoon. Both blew my mind the first time I watched them back-to-back; they’re tiny, jittery, brilliant experiments that seeded everything that came after, and I love how uneasy and inventive they feel compared to today’s slick productions.