Humorous Phases of Funny Faces(1906)
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is a silent cartoon directed by James Stuart Blackton released in 1906. The short film is generally regarded by film historians as the first animated film.[1]
The cartoon uses stop-motion as well as stick puppetry to produce a series of effects. It features a cartoonist drawing faces of people on a chalkboard, and the people move from one pose to another. It features movements as where a dog jumps through a hoop, a scene which actually uses cutout animation made to look like chalk outlines.
This is done for most of the length of the film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures, just as Edwin Porter moved his letters in How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame.
The film moves at 20 frames per second.