Animated film featuring the hand of Walter R. Booth drawing a coster and his donah who come to life and dance. The hand then crumples up the paper and dispenses it in the form of confetti. (BFI)
Similar titles
Reviews
Despite the claim that this was Britain's first animated film, a viewing of he two clips available shows no animation. Instead it shows several instances of some quite lovely camera trickery.Walter Booth, like Georges Melies, came to movies from stage magic. While Melies was interested in adding to his bag of tricks and extending his grammar of story-telling, with this effort Walter Booth tore up the model and started from scratch. It is the hands of the artist --- presumably Booth's -- which construct the world of the film and which point out the details, using camera masking. The effect is fascinating, but like Melies' conjoint grammar, it would vanish within a decade.