enough animation to carry on with the help of two assistants. The series lasted for several years. Cohl continued work with Éclair throughout this debacle, mostly making newsreel inserts. Based on the few fragments that remain, the series Les Aventures des Pieds Nickelés [Adventures of the Leadfoot Gang] may have been the best work of Cohl's career. It was based on a working class comic strip by Louis Forton about a gang of anarchistic youngsters constantly getting into trouble with both the criminal underground and the law. The series was terminated by the war, as the Éclair-Journal studios were occupied to make American war propaganda. Cohl spent the rest of the war serving his country. He joined the United States Air Service Supply as a volunteer on 11 May 1918. His son André had joined the American Transportation Division the previous November. With the war over, Cohl quit Éclair in May 1920 and made his last significant film, Fantoche cherche un logement ["Puppet Looks for an Apartment"]. It was released as La Maison du fantoche ["Puppet's Mansion"] in April 1921 by AGC. The only notice paid to it in the trade journals was a one-line plot summary. Nobody cared about Cohl's work anymore, or any other French filmmaker, for that matter. Cohl's career was finished, since there was no longer any way to justify the cost of an animated short subject in a world of live-action features. Cohl's financial situation deteriorated during the Great Depression and he endured years of severe poverty. While his peer George Méliès was awarded the Legion of Honor medal in 1931, scant attention was given Cohl's pioneering work in animated film. In the spring of 1937, at the age of 80, his face was lightly burned when a candle on his desk set fire to his beard. During a couple of months stay at a charity hospital, the young film journalist René Jeanne helped organize a benefit screening of Cohl's work, which played at the Champs-Elysées Cinema on 19 January 1938, the day before Cohl's death, two weeks after his 81st birthday. Coincidentally, Georges Méliès died hours later. Cohl's ashes are kept in the columbarium of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. Filmography as a director N.I.-Ni- C'est fini (1908) L' hôtel du silence (1908) Le violoniste (1908) le veau (1908) Le prince Azur (1908) Le petit soldat qui devient Dieu (1908) Le mouton enragé (1908)