Every cartoon of this day can trace its lineage back to Emile Cohl, the young artist and caricaturist. Born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courte and growing up amidst a new artistic renaissance in Paris, among puppeteers and bohemians, he took up a job with the most well known cartoonist of the age, Andre Gill, where he took up his pseudonym and developed the drawing style that would be on full display in his master work.

On this day, August 17, in 1908, Cohl released his Fantasmagorie animated cartoon, the first ever non-live action production.

Borrowing partly from the Lumiere brothers and partly from vaudeville chalkboard artists, Cohl made each drawing on an illuminated glass plate and then traced over them with minor shifts. He produced some 700 drawings for the two minute work, all told. Although his white lines on white on paper and then printing in negative. The title of the cartoon, meaning “dream-like” was appropriate to the stream-of-consciousness plot with no discernible story.