Matches An Appeal and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

Some of the earliest animations were stop motion, made just over a hundred years ago.



Matches was the first - An animation made for match company Bryant and May. They asked for donations of money so that they could send matches out to British troops fighting in the Boar war. The animation uses matches, photographed one movement at a time. The matches write out a plea to have money sent, and I think this works very well, firstly because it was new, using techniques people had never seen before, and second for the idea of actually using matches to show ask for money, making the animation actually relevant to the cause. This animation brought Britain even further in front of other European countries in terms of animation, and was a starting point for many of the pioneers of animation now.





Stop motion and cut out elements were used to make Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, using hand drawn images to makes the expression on the faces move. This was made at 20 frames per second, making the animation fairly smooth. It begins with just film, as the artists' hand is shown drawing out the first character, then the second appears using actual stop motion techniques. This is widely regarded as the first animated film, with some arguments about whether Matches Appeal [above] was actually created at the time it claims to have been. HPoFF was made in 1906 in the United States for entertainment purposes only, and was a silent animation.

I prefer Matches of the two just because of the idea behind it - the animation was made to ask for money for matches, so using matches in the actual animation and making it relevant to the cause is a lot more interesting. Since we have much more choice of animation to watch for entertainment now with new technology, HPoFF doesn't have the effect on me tat it would have done on viewers at the time,  so I think if this was 100 years earlier I would have enjoyed it a lot more.