Cute and strange; oh, and it's the first animated thing put to film... ever. Impressive for that alone, AND it has a story! It may not be too deep, and may be a little confusing (what's with the guy that comes out of nowhere and steals the guy's ukulele or whatever it is, is he a ghost?) But it does have a beginning, middle and sort of an end, maybe, arguably. For what this french animator was able to accomplish - and did I mention in COLOR no less - and for the simple fact that this is one of the major accomplishments of that century, to get something with images moving, albeit jerkily, I say you should check out all four minutes on YouTube or wherever silent film shorts are sold.

It is said that Pauvre Pierrot (1892) was the first animated film ever (it was presented with Le Clown et ses chiens (1892) and Un bon bock (1892)). Was exhibited in October 1892 when Charles-Émile Reynaud opened his Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin. It is probably the first usage of film perforations. Pauvre Pierrot originally consisted of 500 individually painted images, which originally was 15 minutes long, but the 1996 restoration made it 4 minutes long.The story is about Harlequin (best-known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte), Colombina (a stock character in the Commedia dell'Arte, she is Harlequin's mistress, a comic servant playing the tricky slave type and wife of Pierrot) and Pierrot (is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte). It is a comedy, though nowadays it isn't that funny, in its time it must have been one of the funniest things that existed. I wish I was there when it happened.

This might be fairly basic animation compared to today's 3D computer-generated spectaculars, but it is in its own way just as remarkable. Emile Reynaud developed many marvels like this, and operated some rather tricky mechanism to screen it. Sadly, Reynaud was not only something of a perfectionist who personally hand-painted every image of every film, he also only trusted himself to operate the screenings. and therefore stretched himself a little too far. He was hugely successful before the advent of movies, but was incapable of progressing and stands as a singular warning of the fate that befalls any business that fails to adapt to a changing market. The film has historical importance, and as a bitter and impoverished Reynaud destroyed most of his films years after the film industry had made his shows obsolete, it's something of a minor miracle that it still exists today.

Charles-Émile Reynaud deserves credit as the inventor of the animated cartoon. Unfortunately, he was a poor businessman, and his artistic innovations outstripped the technical hardware which he invented to exhibit them. Reynaud died penniless in a Val-de-Marne hospice. A few years before he died, embittered, he took most of his animated films -- too deteriorated to be restored yet again -- and flung them off Pont Saint-Michel into the Seine. I am reluctant to describe any movie as 'lost' unless it was deliberately destroyed, since many early films which some expert described as 'lost forever' have returned from the dead. Sadly, it does appear that the most of the cartoons drawn and produced by Reynaud -- each running 15 minutes or less -- are, indeed, lost.Reynaud's first innovation was to adapt the zoetrope -- basically a toy -- into the more sophisticated praxinoscope. This placed a series of drawings on the inside of a cylinder, with a mirror at the centre. As the cylinder revolved, an onlooker -- viewing the mirror through a slit -- would see the drawings as a continuous moving image, courtesy of the same optical illusion (persistence of vision) now exploited by modern films. But the length of the 'story' told by a praxinoscope was limited to the number of images which could be displayed within the cylinder's finite diameter. Usually, a praxinoscope's drawings depicted a single event happening over and over (with each circuit of the cylinder).Reynaud's next innovation was to devise a much longer filmstrip, which -- with sprocket holes -- could be fed into and out of the praxinoscope so as to display a much longer sequence of images. A dedicated artist, Reynaud painted his drawings in bright elaborate colours, and affixed them to the transparent filmstrip via a flexible clear gelatin. Unfortunately, Reynaud's technical innovations did not allow for the permanence of his art. As the gelatin aged, it hardened and cracked while turning opaque. The heat of his projection lamp corrupted the delicate colours of his images. The sprocket holes tore easily. The very act of projecting his filmstrips contributed to their destruction. This seems to have been the single greatest reason for Reynaud's commercial failure: the tremendous amount of labour, time and money expended on creating one of his filmstrips could not be recouped in the very small number of projections (for paying audiences) which it would sustain before deteriorating.'Poor Pierrot', running slightly less than 15 minutes, is a fairly conventional harlequinade. In a garden lit by a crescent moon, the rivals Pierrot and Harlequin vie for the love of the fair Columbine. Harlequin has a baton, which he uses to frighten Pierrot and chase him away. End of story.The great appeal of Reynaud's films was in their novelty (which nowadays can only be estimated) and their visual beauty (for which we have little surviving evidence) rather than in their (necessarily) extremely simple stories. Consequently, I shan't hazard a guess as to a quantified rating of his films' worthiness. Instead of rating 'Poor Pierrot' on a scale of one to 10, I'll lament the deterioration of Reynaud's films and his final embittered act of destroying most of their surviving remnants. Better grease up the time machine, set it for 1910, and rescue those strips which Reynaud threw from the Saint Michel Bridge.