Pauvre Pierrot, directed by Charles-Émile Reynaud, is one of the first animated films ever made. It is made up of 500 individually painted images and originally lasted about 15 minutes. The version available to today is a 4 minute version, restored from pieces of the original.
It's a simple story of a woman with two men wooing her, one she cares for, and the other which is somewhat a nuisance to her, even if he is sincere. To achieve his effects, Reynaud invented his Théâtre-Optique system which was basically a zoetrope with a projector. The images showed successive images of moving figures in front of blackbackgrounds. These images could be adjusted in real-time to project tthe animated characters against an immobile background image which was being projected by a second projector from a painted glass plate.
At times the show was quite elaborate. Original music and songs were written for the show, played by an piano accompanyist and sung by an actor. Reynaud performed 12,800 shows from 1892 to 1900. Commercially successful for a time, the popularity of these shows were eventually overtaken by the projected camera live action films of the Lumières and others.
It's a simple story of a woman with two men wooing her, one she cares for, and the other which is somewhat a nuisance to her, even if he is sincere. To achieve his effects, Reynaud invented his Théâtre-Optique system which was basically a zoetrope with a projector. The images showed successive images of moving figures in front of blackbackgrounds. These images could be adjusted in real-time to project tthe animated characters against an immobile background image which was being projected by a second projector from a painted glass plate.
At times the show was quite elaborate. Original music and songs were written for the show, played by an piano accompanyist and sung by an actor. Reynaud performed 12,800 shows from 1892 to 1900. Commercially successful for a time, the popularity of these shows were eventually overtaken by the projected camera live action films of the Lumières and others.