Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

The oldest surviving animated film, and it still has charm to burn. J. Stuart Blackton draws faces on a chalkboard and, through the magic of stop-motion photography, they come to life — winking, smoking cigars, morphing from one expression to another. At barely three minutes, it's more a proof of concept than a story, but the concept it proves is enormous: that drawings could move, that the hand of the artist could animate the inanimate. Every cartoon character from Mickey Mouse to Spider-Verse can trace its ancestry back to this blackboard.