Whenever one encounters these fragments, it''s hard to evaluate them in totality. What we do see is very well done. The young woman who plays the butterfly is quite striking in appearance. The colors are vivid and the special effects are clean and sharp. Once again, Melies draws on his talents as a magician and presents a "show" to the audience. Obviously, he does things that could not have been done on a conventional stage. But that's why he became a director.

This is a slightly nightmarish short from Georges Méliès. In it a magician creates a butterfly woman and then a spider woman. This malignant being threatens to wreak havoc but is repelled in an explosion.Like others this one is colour tinted which definitely adds a lot to the aesthetic. It also has a much more macabre and creepy feel than other Méliès fantasy shorts although it is at heart still a magic show. It's quite bizarre really. The other commentators have mentioned that this is only a section of a larger film. No matter, what remains is like a fragment of a weird dream you can half remember.

It's hard to adequately vote for this one since it's only a two minute fragment--so I'll just skip the score for this one.The film is another magician film from director Georges Méliès and as usual he plays the lead. The magician has some pretty weird powers. First, he makes a giant butterfly lady appear. Then he creates some sort of abomination of nature that looks like it's part woman, part spider and part octopus--and the creature appears ready to run amok and the film ends.This is just weird. Yep, very weird. But the effects, for 1909, are decent and the color is really, really nice. Flicker Alley must have done a lot of work to bring out the original look to the film with its vibrant hand-stenciled cels. Interesting but incomplete.

Le papillon fantastique (1909) aka The Spider and the Butterfly Even though there are nearly two-hundred Georges Melies films available on DVD, the sad fact remains that there are many more lost. This film here is only available in a fragment piece that runs just under two minutes. The story is pretty simple as a magician (played by Melies) creates a butterfly (a female actress with wings) and then he creates a spider (again, a female actress) who pulls the butterfly into its web. I'm not sure what all originally happened in this film but what's remaining is pretty interesting and is certainly worth watching for fans of Melies as well as the horror genre. One major plus is that the film was hand-tinted and this adds a lot of charm to the film including a great bit where Melies fires a gun and we see an orange color being used for the shot. I really enjoyed the colors that he used once the attack started and it's quite creepy in its own way. While this thing is far from a masterpiece it's still worth viewing and this fragment will have to do until something more turns up.