The next year, a cold kept him confined in his father's apartment, where he began stamp collecting, a hobby that would become his sole source of income several times in his life.

The chaos caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the following siege of Paris led to the closing of Elie Courtet's rubber factory.

Émile was transferred to the less-exclusive Ecole Turgot, but his lessons were soon forgotten as the teenager wandered the streets of Paris to watch history being made.

In 1878, Émile obtained a letter of recommendation from Étienne Carjat to approach André Gill, the best-known caricaturist of the day, for a job.

Gill's trademark was the large, recognizable head of the target (with a fairly benign expression) atop a small puppet body (doing something ridiculous).

One of these, "Aveugle par Ac-Sedan", a French pun on "accidentally blind" and "Bungler at Sedan", put its creator, Émile Cohl, in jail on 11 October 1879, making him instantly famous.

Cohl's Incoherent art joined his caricatures and satiric news reporting at La Nouvelle Lune, where he had become the major contributor and acting editor.

In 1886, Cohl produced his most bizarre and characteristic work in the Incoherent vein: Abus des metaphors, a collection of more than a dozen colourful expressions brought to life.

After the collapse of his marriage, Cohl moved to London to work for Pick Me Up, a humor magazine that specialized in French artists (he left his long-standing second job as a philatelist at this time).

According to Jean-Georges Auriol in a book published in 1930, one day Cohl was walking down the street when he spotted a poster advertising a movie obviously stolen from one of his strips.

Outraged, he confronted the manager of the offending studio (Gaumont) and was hired on the spot as a scenarist (responsible for one-page story ideas for movies).

At Gaumont, Cohl collaborated with the other directors whenever possible, learning cinematography from Arnaud and directing chases, comedies, féeries ("fairy pieces"), and pageants.

The idea for doing animation was born from the huge success of the film The Haunted Hotel, released by Vitagraph and directed by J. Stuart Blackton.

It borrowed from Blackton in using a "chalk-line effect" (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces).

The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.

An artist is sketching a classically draped model holding a broom as a stick-figure when a collector storms in demanding to know the progress of his work.

Motifs of Cohl's can be found in Little Nemo and later films by McCay: the dots coalescing into Little Nemo reflect effects in Un Drame Chez les Fantoches and Les Joyeux Microbes; the metamorphosis of the rose into the Princess may have been inspired by Fantasmagorie; the titular character of The Story of a Mosquito (1912) sharpening his beak comes from Un Drame Chez les Fantoches; the live-action/animation interaction of McCay throwing a pumpkin to Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) may have been an answer to the matador hurling his hatchet at the moon in Clair de lune espagnol.

He made only two animated films before being forced into exclusively live-action work as a director of burlesques starring Jobard (Lucien Cazalis), one of the first generation of great screen comics.

One of those two animated films was Le Ratapeur de cervelles ["Brains Repaired"], which is a rehash of Les Joyeux Microbes using a mental disease.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

At Ellis Island, he was required, for "sanitary reasons", to shave off the mustache he had worn for thirty years in honour of André Gill.

Despite the inevitable xenophobia from the locals, the French colony at Fort Lee was enthusiastic about having finally invaded the coveted American market.

The three main characters are a fashionable woman drawn in the style of the "Gibson Girl", her obliging husband, and Baby Snookums, an absolute hellion of a child who nevertheless gets everything he wants (usually at the expense of the father).

Examples include Happy Hooligan (starring J. Stuart Blackton as the title character), Buster Brown, and Mutt and Jeff (later to become a successful animated series).

Cohl achieved his speed (13 Newlyweds cartoons in 13 months) by using the bare minimum of actual animation, the scenes consisting of static tableau with dialog balloons appearing above each character's head (done faithfully in the McManus style).

Based on the few fragments that remain, the series Les Aventures des Pieds Nickelés [Adventures of the Leadfoot Gang] may have been the best work of Cohl's career.

It was based on a working class comic strip by Louis Forton about a gang of anarchistic youngsters constantly getting into trouble with both the criminal underground and the law.

With the war over, Cohl quit Éclair in May 1920 and made his last significant film, Fantoche cherche un logement ["Puppet Looks for an Apartment"].

Cohl's career was finished, since there was no longer any way to justify the cost of an animated short subject in a world of live-action features.

While his peer George Méliès was awarded the Legion of Honor medal in 1931, scant attention was given Cohl's pioneering work in animated film.