Apparently this film was commissioned by a department store, so that children could watch something and be entertained while their parents were shopping. The fact that 117 years later I could watch in my living room and wonder what the experience must have been like in 1906 tickles me.
The first thing that stands out in the production is the coloration, which was all done by hand, which at this era's frame rate and this film's length must have been well over 10,000 frames. There are no intertitles, so not being familiar with Breton folklore or the Carabosse, it took a second viewing after a Wikipedia perusal to completely understand it. There are lots of fun little elements, like the myriad beasts guarding the damsel's castle. My favorite was the witch flying through the air on her broomstick, in hot pursuit of the escaping couple. It was also interesting that the morality was kind of inverted here, since the troubadour cheated the witch to begin with.
This is Méliès in his heyday, that period between 1897 and 1914 when he made 600 films, the first to explore the fairy-tale (Cinderella), fantasy (The Bewitched Inn), science fiction (A Trip to the Moon), and the film serial (dramatizing the Dreyfus affair). He meticulous planned out his films as scénarimages, essentially inventing the modern storyboard, and for each of them, designed the sets and costumes, occasionally acted (apparently he's the title character here), and devised the special effects that would become his trademark. (All of this information comes from Alice Guy First Lady of Film by Catel and Bocquet). How incredibly tragic that after the ugly patent tussle with Edison and demise of Star Film, Méliès, at 62, ruined and disillusioned, he would burn his entire cinematographic archive in the garden of his house from which bailiffs were evicting him. It's a minor miracle this print survives, as many of those still in existence only did because of the bootleg copies that plagued him, ironically enough. Watch it in 1906 mode, and enjoy.
