Cuisine abracadabrante (1908) Online

By 1908, Segundo de Chomón, rival of Georges Méliès, had moved past simple camera tricks and was moving into newer territory. In the first half of this 3-minute short we are treated to some rags transforming into cooks, who then transform into large utensils which become animated. One of the interesting things to note here is the pixilation technique Chomón used to make one of the cooks move as though he was a stop-motion puppet. The cooking part comes in when this animated cook lies on the floor and is chopped up. It's quite fun to watch.

The second half of the film, however, is not nearly as innovative and consists mostly of the cooks dancing around with their large utensils. While it is somewhat fun to watch, it has barely any trick effects at all and is a pointless addition to the short. Even so, Méliès fans will want to check this out because of all the energy brought to the film and the nice animation.

Georges Melies was an important competitor to Pathe Freres for the French film market, and Pathe wanted his market share. To take it, they used Segundo de Chomon, who had started in the film industry as a cameraman. De Chomon directed the same sort of high-energy magic show; given Pathe's greater resources (they produced records, record players and film equipment and had their own theaters; Melies had to rely on independent exhibitors). His work had more chorines than Melies.

This is a fairly typical example, as a cook appears from nowhere, becomes a horde of cooks and giant utensils and pour out of a giant samovar onto the screen. There's some fairly decent if primitive animation. If this sort of film would vanish from the screen as the point of a movie, for the moment it was deservedly popular.