How Did Émile Cohl Influence Modern Animation?

Honestly, digging into Cohl's films is like finding the origin story of a language every animator speaks now.

I get nerdy about this: Émile Cohl's 1908 short 'Fantasmagorie' is usually pointed to as one of the first true animated cartoons, and watching it you see why. It isn't polished by modern standards, but it's pure idea — hundreds of hand-drawn frames strung together to make characters move, morph, and tell a tiny visual joke. Cohl used negative printing to give that chalk-on-blackboard look, and his looping metamorphoses (objects turning into people, people turning into clocks) set a template for visual comedy and continuous transformation that shows up in everything from early American shorts to surreal indie pieces today.

Beyond the tricks, what I love is how Cohl helped move animation from being a cinematic curiosity into a medium that could carry narrative and personality. He borrowed the theatrical sense of timing from Méliès but added sequential drawing as a storytelling tool: cause and effect across frames, small gags building into a rhythm. That idea — that you can pace a joke, develop movement over time, and make an audience empathize with a drawn figure — is a throughline to the features and series that came decades later. When I rewatch those early reels, I feel a direct line from those scratchy drawings to everything from classic cartoons to modern experimental shorts, and it makes me appreciate how much of today's visual play owes itself to his curiosity.

When I'm scribbling frame-by-frame on my tablet late at night, Cohl is the little phantom in the corner nudging me toward basics every animator learns the hard way.

Practically speaking, Cohl invented—or at least popularized—techniques that set the groundwork for the workflow we use now. He committed to producing consecutive drawings to create motion, which is the ancestor of keyframes and in-betweens. He also explored visual metamorphosis and looping, which taught early filmmakers how to maintain continuity and comedic timing across repeated cycles. Even though the formal principles like squash-and-stretch or anticipation were named later, you can see their spirit in his work: exaggerated motion, unexpected transformations, and clear cause-and-effect between frames.

If you're trying to study him, don't expect long narratives; watch for rhythm, timing, and how a single gesture reads over several frames. Try doing a flipbook of one of his scenes — it reveals the logic of motion in a way a written description can't. For anyone practicing animation, Cohl is a reminder that tools change but the core problems—making movement read, making gags land, and making characters feel alive—are the same. His films are a little manual in motion, and I go back to them whenever I'm rethinking how a single cut or loop should feel.

Cohl's films hit me like a secret ancestor of all the wacky cartoons I grew up loving. I first saw 'Fantasmagorie' on a late-night binge and laughed at how freely everything melted into everything else; that surreal, elastic humor is basically the DNA of slapstick cartoons and even some anime gags.

What stuck with me is the playful editing and the idea that you can tell a tiny story through continuous change—no spoken lines, only motion and surprise. Modern animators (and meme-makers) still borrow that directly: endless morphs, impossible transformations, and quick visual punches. Even motion graphics and experimental shorts nod to his spirit: you can go from doodles to sophisticated CGI but keep the same sense of joyful invention.

So for anyone who thinks animation must be glossy or high-def to matter, Cohl is proof that clever timing and imagination are everything. I always leave his films smiling and a little inspired to try the next ridiculous morph in my own sketchbook.