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Well Deserved Praise

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Segundo de Chomón's "Chinese Shadows" is another decent attempt to take away Georges Méliès's market in trick films. I don't think I've ever seen Méliès do what Chomón did here. Instead of a bunch of standard stop tricks like was Méliès's fashion, Chomón uses shadow animation as the main effect.There's no real plot here, though. The film is simply about two Chinese women putting on a show of Chinese animation. The animation has no story to tell either: things morph together into others, people and objects split apart, sometimes things transform into other things. It's just fun animation. Nothing outstanding but it's pretty good animation for 1908. Too bad Chomón wasn't doing stuff like this earlier, because by 1908 trick films were pretty much out of style.

"Les Ombres Chinoises" is a film by Segundo de Chomón that seems to have been inspired by his brilliant previous film "Kiri-Kis". Both feature French folk dressed up in very stereotypical Asian garb--in this case they were supposed to be Chinese and in "Kiri-Kis", Japanese. I think that he probably just re-used some of the costumes and sets. However, it's a huge mistake to think this is just another "Kiri-Kis', as the middle of the film is very different. Using stop-motion, various cut out paper shapes dance about forming pictures. It's the sort of thing that probably had audiences at the time guessing as to what the various shapes were to become. While this is not brilliant animation, it is exceptional for 1908 and one of the earliest animated films. It debuted the same year as other animated films--"Fantasmagorie" by the French director Émile Cohl and "Humpty Dumpty Circus" by Smith and Blackton--and all are considered the first or close to the first animated films. So, in this regard "Les Ombres Chinoises" is a super-important film. Even though the content is rather bland when seen today, it was groundbreaking in the day.

At the beginning of this film, two women come onstage, dressed in Oriental fashion -- they look to be in Japanese garb rather than Chinese, but I could be mistaken or the contemporary audience might not have known the difference. At the end they disassemble the props and do a bit of stop-motion magic. All fairly standard for Segundo de Chomon.However the middle and majority of this movie is taken up by silhouette animation as figures are disassembled and assembled into something else. This was the year that Cohl started to become prominent and it looks like his work... but who can tell more than a hundred years later?Cohl or not, it's still pretty good.