direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls. Fantasmagorie was released on 17 August 1908. This was followed by two more films, Le Cauchemar du fantoche ["The Puppet's Nightmare"] and Un Drame chez les fantoches ["A Puppet Drama", called The Love Affair in Toyland for American release and Mystical Love-Making for British release], all completed in 1908. These three films are united by their chalk-line style, the stick-figure clown protagonists, and the constant transformations. Cohl made the plots of these films up as he was filming them. He would put a drawing on the lightbox, photograph it, trace onto next sheet with slight changes, photograph that, and so on. This meant that the pictures did not jitter and the plot was spontaneous. Cohl had to calculate the timing in advance. The process was demanding and time-consuming, which is probably why he moved away from drawn animation after Un Drame chez les fantoches. The rest of the films Cohl made for Gaumont involve strange transformations (Les Joyeux Microbes [The Joyous Microbes, aka The Merry Microbes (UK)] (1909)), some great matte effects (Clair de lune espagno [Spanish Moonlight, aka The Man in the Moon (US), aka The Moon-Struck Matador (UK)] (1909)), and loving puppet animation (Le Tout Petit Faust [The Little Faust, aka The Beautiful Margaret (US)] (1910)). Other films used jointed cut-outs or animated matches (the later an especial favorite of Cohl's). In his lifetime, Cohl's most famous film was Le Peintre néo-impressionniste ["The Neo-Impressionistic Painter"], made in 1910. An artist is sketching a classically draped model holding a broom as a stick-figure when a collector storms in demanding to know the progress of his work. The artist shows the collector a series of blank colored canvases (the film is color-tinted). As he gives their ridiculous titles, the collector imagines them being drawn on the canvas. For example, the red canvas is A cardinal eating lobster with tomatoes by the banks of the Red Sea. The collector is soon so delirious that he buys every blank canvas he can see. Quite obviously, the artist is not a neo-Impressionist (the name taken from the latest vogue in Paris)--he's an Incoherent. The Cohl animated films had a large impact through their American distribution by Kleine. Many of them