Fancy Matches
Fancy Matches
| 13 July 1914 (USA)
Fancy Matches Trailers

To the rhythm of a frenzied choreography, acrobatic matches come to life on a black background. Leaving their matchbox, they line the film in circular, concentric movements. In an almost aquatic momentum, the squadron of little bits of wood mould the contours of a character, a run-of-the-mill smoker, before transforming into a funny harness. The film ends when the matches, again transformed, take on the appearance of a distinguished man who, after several attempts, finally finds a way of lighting his cigarette.

Reviews
Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict
Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
boblipton This rare Emile Cohl animation is not so rare as it used to be: it can be found on the Europa Film Treasure site.It's another typically untypical Emile Cohl work, owing as much to stop-motion animation as straight cartooning, with a lot of abstract figures and sketches done with matchsticks. It's also a stream-of-consciousness non-narrative as the figures transform from one to another, with intermissions of pipes, cigars and finally cigarettes. Cohl worked absurdly fast in an era before the Bray patents or rotoscoping. His only real competition was Winsor MacKay, who produced one cartoon every few years. It would be another year before Raoul Barre entered the fray with THE ARTIST'S DREAM and another two years before he began his regular series for Edison with THE ANIMATED GROUCH CHASER. Eventually the history of cartoons would proceed from Barre's work, and Cohl's work would be an interesting early bypath in their evolution. But they are still entertaining in their own right.