Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy

A smoker falls asleep, and two mischievous fairies play with his pipe. He discovers this, and imprisons them in a cigar box. He removes a flower from the box, which contains a fairy smoking a cigarette.

Rating a film that is only five minutes long is a bit of a challenge. In this case, the title of the film is longer than the film itself. (Well, not literally.) But for 1909 it really deserves a lot of credit. The illusion of making people look small and interacting with full size people is easy today (2016), but for its time was probably not just a novelty but almost revolutionary. The Germans became the masters of trick cinema in the 1920s, but this clearly predates them...