The Bewitched Traveller (1904) Online

This special effects-filled comedy shows technique that is quite good for such an early movie, and it is pretty amusing to watch. The visual tricks are also done in a slightly different style than was usual for features of this kind, making it something of an interesting curiosity from the technical standpoint.

The story follows a man who prepares to go on a journey, only to find at every step that something is going wrong. The incidents in themselves are pure fantasy, but it is somewhat perceptive in playing off of the way that unexpected problems always seem to crop up at the least convenient times. Although you sympathize with "The Bewitched Traveller", his misadventures are at times pretty funny. The finale is also clever and humorous.

At the time, the usual technique in making this kind of feature was to use simple stop-motion, so that an object appeared in one frame and was completely absent from the next. These film-makers tried something different and more labor-intensive, combining stop-motion with a double exposure technique that makes various objects seem to fade in and fade out, sometimes simultaneously. The effect is rather interesting, and in a couple of the sequences it works nicely. It makes this short movie interesting technically, as well as for the comedy itself.