The Untamable Whiskers

The premise is simple; the execution is not. Melies draws faces on a chalkboard. After each drawing, he stands front and center and become the picture. Eventually, our old friend the devil takes his turn after being drawn. The neat thing in this is the ability to match up these chalk drawings with the figures Melies creates. Very good.

I watched this as one of the shorts on The magic of Melies video cassette released by Kino on Video, 1994. Image quality was good. Music was chipper and matched the lighthearted mood of the film. No color was added. Cropping did not appear to interfere with the film, although it is hard to tell without titles. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.

This film was mainly done to show off a particular special effect. A magician draws pictures on a chalkboard, and then his facial hair grows to fit the image he has drawn. This is part magic act, part comic routine. It is amusing, but special effects are so common today that it is not amazing, as it must have been to the people who first viewed it. Basically an image of the magician with one type of hair fades into an image of the same magician in the same position with another type of hair. The quality of this special effect is fairly good, so it didn't seem cheap, just redundant.

My recommendation is to watch it if you are interested in very early film history. It is a good example of a setup that is similar to a booth or simple theater show, but depicts something that could never be shown live. This film predates plots being the norm in movies, and itself has no plot.

Nothing too special here - Melies draws a chalk picture and then becomes the picture he draws. Then becomes a clown and it ends up he's the devil and disappears.

6/10

Watching this film over 120 years after its release, I have to say the type of humor and tricks it uses no longer bring a smile to your face. It feels outdated, a relic of a different world where entertainment was quite different from today. However, it does inspire genuine respect, as the director was pioneering techniques that were truly novel and experimental at the time. This film focuses particularly on metamorphosis-in other words, shifting from one character or appearance to another right before our eyes. The director seemed especially fond of facial hair growth, so we see the main character's hair, beard, and mustache magically grow or shrink on screen. To add to the fun, he first sketches them on a blackboard, showing impressive drawing skills as well. Back then, this must have felt like real magic on screen. Interestingly, it has always been challenging to make this metamorphosis trick look smooth-even some films from the 1980s look quite rough. Of course, by the mid-2020s we've seen far more advanced effects, but this film comes from the dawn of the 20th century, when the film industry was just taking its first steps.

Georges Melies once again takes centre-stage as he plays a quick-sketch artist who possesses the ability to transform himself into whatever character he draws on his blackboard. Of course the transformation is performed by movie trickery, and for its time it is quite impressive, even though 105 years on it is easy to see the joins. Some of the characters Melies turns himself into are quite grotesque; one of them is a scary clown reminiscent of the villain in Stephen King's It, another a devil with horns and a cape. This is a simple movie lasting little more than two minutes, but it's hugely entertaining and gives the versatile Melies an opportunity to show off his artistic skills.