Fantasmagorie - The very first animated movies in history

"Fantasmagorie" is a French animation movie made by Émile Cohl in 1908, which's considered the first animated cartoon ever.

Émil Cohl was a French graphic artist and he's also the first cartoon filmmaker in Europe. In the year of 1908, he joined the Gaumont film company as a writer, then moved to making animated films. He actually made a lot of films (more than 250 products), using drawings, puppets, cut-outs, and more.

Cohl's film of "Fantasmagorie“ (or also known as Phantasmagoria in English) is likely the very first animated film in the history. 

Fantasmagorie defined as "a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imaged“. Émil Cohl worked on this film for around 5 months. He had drawn each frame on paper which he shot onto negative film. For this film, each frame on paper takes him about 80 seconds to complete, and he had to draw totally about 700 pictures which he photographed later. The colors in the negatives weren’t inverted on the film; therefore, it looks like chalk on a blackboard though it was originally drawn with a black pen on white paper.

The film has no real story or structure. You can see different scenes that are morphing into other different images. In the 1st scene, a hand is drawing a little clown which doubles as a chubby guy who falls into a chair in a theater. 

(Source of information: http://www.lomography.com/)

History of pencil

The modern pencil was first invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, who's a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It this material was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the 15th century. despite the fact that the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. It was initially believed to be a form of lead and was called ‘plumbago’ or black lead (so the ‘plumbers’ who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil ‘leads’. 

This stuff was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word of ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to write’. Well, the pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin language ‘pencillus’, meaning ‘little tail’, to describe the small ink brushes  that were used for writing in the Middle Ages.