Animated Putty (1911) watch online HD

This very early piece of stop-motion animation directed by Walter R . Booth may be viewed on the BFI site on YouTube.

By the time this movie was made, Emile Cohl had been doing stop-motion animation over in France for four years, beginning with work for fantasy films for Segundo de Chomon. It's hard for me to say that this was Booth's first venture into claymation, but it is the earliest I have seen so far, and as with most technical advances in films, particularly at this stage of the cinema, the subject of the film was the technique itself. The viewer sees a series of rough lumps of putty transform themselves into recognizable shapes: eagles and windmills and devils and similar metamorphoses.

Nowadays, we see these techniques used for other purposes, to tell the stories of Gumby and Pokey, or to sell raisins, or shows us the unlikely adventures of a cheese-loving man and his silent but attentive dog. In 1911, the technique was enough to command the attention of the audience and, frankly, it's still pretty good.