3. The earliest use of animation was to send matches to British troops
In 1899 British soldiers were far from home, fighting the Boers in southern Africa. Among the travails they faced was a lack of means to light their pipes and cigars, as well as the increasingly popular cigarettes. Matches were in short supply. A British filmmaker, Arthur Melbourne Cooper, created a 30-second film short aimed at encouraging the folks on the home front to voluntarily send matches to the troops. The short was entirely animated, using the technique which became known as “stop-action animation“. In the film, characters made from wooden matches wrote a request on a blackboard with chalk. Considering that the film was made in 1899 it was decades ahead of its time, and when it was shown at London’s Empire Theater in December audiences were enthralled.
It was the first animated movie, the first film to be used to solicit donations for the benefit of others, and the first use of the stop-action technique. The latter was noted by competitors, but the cost of filming one frame at a time was prohibitive, and following up on the technique was slow. Over the next decade or so various filmmakers expanded on the technique, using mediums such as clay and eventually human beings. By 1908 drawings were being used, pioneered by French and American film artists. The smoothly depicted motions of Mickey Mouse and other iconic animated characters were still decades away, but the power of artificial figures moving on screen was clearly demonstrated before the First World War, and filmmakers in Europe and America exploited their ability to gain an audience’s attention and motivate their behavior in the early days of the twentieth century.