Japanese Fantasy (1909) ** 1/2 (out of 4)This film from director Emile Cohl is actually the shortest I've seen from him since this lasts just under a minute. What we basically get is some stop-motion, which shows us various haiku dolls that seem to come to life and other insects that show up. Trying to find any sort of story in a Cohl film is very difficult and that's certainly true here. Considering this thing runs less than a minutes, it's really hard to judge it but on a technical level it's rather impressive and especially some of the monstrous images that you see. I'm sure you could probably show this thing to a young child today and it would still manage to scare them. I thought the effect with the mice was quite effective as well.

When you watch the earliest silent films, you really need to adjust your expectations. What might seem like a very inconsequential film today might have been a huge hit and innovative title in its day. That's how it often is with the films of the French filmmaker and animator, Émile Cohl."Japanese Magic" is one of the less coherent themes I've seen in a Cohl film. Various Japanese-inspired figures come and go using stop=motion but the film is VERY brief and doesn't seem to have much plot. It's more like an experimental film by Cohl and I can't see it having much interest to anyone today but film scholars and historians. They do get much better than this!