The Automatic Moving Company

This is a nice little piece, an early work of stop-motion animation by pioneer Emile Cohl; it is as much fun as a modern cartoon. The idea is that pieces of furniture have been trained to move themselves, so moving house becomes very easy.

No people appear at any point in the movie.

The English title is The Automatic Moving Company.

Emile Cohl was well-known for his early animation work, but much of it is difficult to appreciate nowadays. The Automatic Moving Company is one of his more accessible works, and it is available on collections like "Animation, the Beginning".

The Automatic Moving Company is a simple yet effective animated feature by Emile Cohl. Its idea is very straightforward. Someone moves home and all the furniture moves houses independently. They animate themselves and move into place in the new home. The animation is very well done and is very smooth. Various items move up and down stairs and all around the house. The whole thing has a nice rhythm and it's a very nice watch. Like many film of the time it's a special effects movie. No people actually appear in it at all. In some ways this improves it, as there is not melodramatic acting and the slightly faster speed of films of the time doesn't affect things adversely in any way. It means that it still probably has the same effect as it did over a century ago.

None of the four reviews prior to this one appears to be actually reviewing the right film. They are all discussing Le Garde-Meubles Automatique or The Automatic Moving Company made by Roméo Bosetti for Pathé in 1912. This is a film entirely using stop-motion figure-animation.

The Cohl film is a film with live actors, the story of a man who is obliged by debt to leave his flat and furniture and move elsewhere. However he has a pleasant surprise when he moves because his furniture has stayed faithful to him and moves itself into his new flat. Obviously this involves a small amount of stop-motion animation at the end of the film, which no doubt suggested the idea for the later film to Bosetti.

In the printed intro to this short stop-motion film in the DVD collection "Saved from the Flames", it mentions that historian Donald Crafton claimed that Romeo Bosetti was responsible for The Automatic Moving Company and it was made in 1911. However, it also mentions Emile Cohl's short with the above title and the 1910 date. It then said that both Cohl and Bosetti worked for Pathe in '11 and occasionally collaborated. So maybe they both worked on this. Anyway, this was a fascinating early look at stop-motion animation as we see furniture after furniture move by themselves to a new home with no help from any humans. Quite a piece of work by whoever made this. By the way, I watched an earlier version of this kind of technique called El Hotel Electrico by Segundo do Chomon when I saw it on YouTube a couple of years ago. Anyway, I highly recommend Mobilier fidele or The Automatic Moving Company.

This is all stop action as a driverless van pulls up in front of a house. The furniture and other contents of the house make their way up stairs and into rooms. Boxes empty themselves; dishes put themselves away. What incredible effort must have gone into filming this. It works well, all the way through.