Emile Cohl: Fantasmagorie 1908. Emile Cohl has been described as the ‘originator of the cartoon film’, and in their classic work The Technique of Film Animation (British Film Academy 1959), John Halas and Roger Manvell describe his work: “The French pioneer Emile Cohl put a series of black-line drawings on sheets of white paper and photographed them. On the screen he used the negative film, and so achieved an action performed by white figures on a black background. It might be claimed in his case that he was less concerned with developing any technical skill than with showing the simple charm possessed by his little match-stick creatures. Even at this primitive stage, the emphasis was artistic rather than technical.” Cohl was the first interesting animator, developing some of the basic techniques (principles) of animation – the idea of shooting a series of drawings and projecting these at a frame-rate fast enough (12 frames/sec) to fool our eyes and brains into seeing movement. At first working in France, he spent some time in the USA, teaching animation techniques. What Halas and Manvell have to say about Cohl is of course quite true, his animations were more a proof of concept than a technical demomnstration of how it could be done, However the illustration above shows that even this ‘humble pioneer’ was able to see how, and invent one of the stock-in-trade techniques that we now call ‘morphing’ (from morphology – study of form and shapes), whereby we gradually change one form into another in a sequence of minor changes) could create fascinating animations, and that animation itself could become not only a mass-cinema medium, but an art-form in itself.

Emile cohl: Un Drame 1908. Cohl’s surreal style of drawing, fully exploiting what Eisenstein called plasmaticness – the ability to change or mutate or transform one object into another at will – illustrates the complete freedom of the artist.

George Herriman: Krazy Kat 1938. Herriman is the great poet-artist of the comic form – a truly unique genius in this medium. His subtle, sardonic, insightful humour, married with his gentle surrealism – and the life with which he endows his tripartite cast of characters, makes this a really exceptional work. Ignatz the mouse hates Krazy Kat, who in turn really loves him, and interprets Ignatz’ incessant brick-throwing as a sign of affection.Krazy hates Offissa Bull Pup who in turn loves Krazy and hates Ignatz. With this slender yet richly fruitful plot-idea, Herriman explores the vagaries and frailties of the human condition and our attempts to relate to others – producing delightfully spare drawings in a series that picture the Jewish Ignatz, the black Kat and the WASP Pupp in a strangely urbanised Arizona Desert (Coccocino County) a landscape that often morphs radically from frame to frame. Herriman drew this strip from 1913 to 1944. I’ve chosen to situate this in 1924 because it was the year that the art critic Gilbert Seldes wrote an appreciative paper on Herriman’s Krazy Kat, that positioned it as ‘serious art’. With his playfully surreal plots, his inventive drawing and experimental frame layouts, Herriman exerted an enormous influence on the development of the comic-form. Herriman epitomises the artist-draftsman, adventurous, innovative, practising Paul Klee’s advice to draw by taking a line for a walk.

Dave Fleischer: Betty Boop in Snow White 1933. Fleischer – always an innovative animator – epitomises the expressive morphing and distortion of characters – here the Evil step-mother is asking her mirror who is the most beautiful one of all? when Betty (Snow White) enters the room.

Lucius Henderson: Jekyll and Hyde (1912). As you can see Henderson relied on just about the simplest possible transition shot – Dr Jykell drinks the potion, bends down, there is a cut, and when he raises his head he is Mr Hyde. Other film-makers used short lap dissolves to achieve the transition – fading out on Jykell, cross-fading in with Hyde – a technique used on the very cusp of digital morphing software by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme in the elegant promo-video for their hit single Cry (1985). The first morph software that I came across was Gryphon Software’s Morph, available for the Mac around 1991-2.

Godley and Creme: Cry 1985 Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were innovative film-makers as well as talented musicians. In their promo-video for the single Cry, they use a head-rest to help pin-register the eyes of several participants as they lap-dissolve between them. I talked to Kevin Godley a few years later about this video, and congratulated them on a successful use of an established optical effects to achieve this.

Fantamorph desktop software. Most desktop morph solutions allowed you to input two resource images, then indicate which features should be retained in the final morph.