Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(2) 163–175 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847711407624 anm.sagepub.com Article Corresponding author: Philippe Gauthier, Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques, Université de Montréal, CP 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: philippe-2.gauthier@polymtl.ca A Trick Question: Are Early Animated Drawings a Film Genre or a Special Effect? Philippe Gauthier Université de Montréal and Université de Lausanne Abstract By abandoning a linear understanding of film history, the author revisits animated film history by placing its emergence within the lineage of trick films. Analysis of discourses on the first animated cartoons – such as the critical and publicity discourses found in trade papers – reveals that these films were seen like any other trick films, not as a distinct type. How, then, can we explain the popularity of the first animated cartoons in the mid-1910s when trick films had almost disappeared? How can we account for the popularity of a variety of ‘trick films’ –animated drawings – precisely when these same trick films had almost ceased to exist? This article addresses these issues by looking at the process by which a major shift occurred in the way we look at the earliest animated drawings. More precisely, the author tries to outline the context of the transition from the perception that animated drawings were trick films to their eventual consecration as a genre within the institution. Keywords animated cartoon, drawn animation, early animation, early cinema, Émile Cohl, genre, historiogra- phy, modes of production, trick film In this article, I propose to reconsider the emergence of animated drawings – or what Jean Georges Auriol (1930: 12) described as the ‘premiers dessins animés cinématographiés’ (‘the first kin- ematographed animated drawings) – in light of a relatively new espistemological position. This historical and theoretical framework was proposed by André Gaudreault in one of his most recent books, entitled Cinéma et attraction. Pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (2008). 1 The main idea behind his book was the following proposition: the dominant paradigm in the early years of cinema was kine-attractography (cinématographie-attraction), followed by the dominance of what Gaudreault proposes to call, in nearly symmetrical terms, in French at least: ‘cinéma-institution’