The Mascot and other films

The Mascot is a circa 1933-1934 short film featuring stop-motion puppet animation.  It was written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz, a Russian-Lithuanian-Polish-French filmmaker whose name has several different spellings.  It's a mostly silent film (not counting the musical score) and stars a stuffed dog that goes on a perilous journey to bring an orange to sick child.  The dog ventures onto the street and even goes to the nighttime Devil's Ball; meanwhile, the canine protagonist encounters human-like toys, some of them are made out of random materials such as utensils, as well as infernal vegetables.

OK, it's a weird film.

The animation is really interesting.  According to his granddaughter, Starewicz made the faces of the puppets by sticking wet chamois-leather on their wooden structure and changed the puppets' expressions by modifying parts of the faces frame-by-frame with dentist's tongs.  Someone who posted a copy of the film online mentioned that Starewicz created a blurring effect for fast movement by moving the puppets during the actual exposure.  Anyway, here is the movie:

By the way, there are different versions of the film online. There are also other Starewicz films online, including Frogland (1922)...

and Cameraman's Revenge (1912).

I agree with Terry Gilliam, who listed The Mascot as one of the ten best animated films of all time, that Starewicz' surreal, imaginative work was a predecessor to subsequent films by Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay.   So I'll use that as an excuse to link to Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's Ossuary.

Silent Frankenstein

The first film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a black-and-white (and color-tinted and color-toned black-and-white) one-reeler made in 1910 by Edison Studios.  This silent movie is only about 15 minutes long (give or take a couple minutes), so it's not surprising that it isn't completely faithful to the novel.  It disregards the book's epistolary form, ignores most of the philosophical issues raised by Shelley, avoids some of the more violent and macabre elements of the story, and both condenses and changes the plot.

While the film seems stagy compared to some other silents of the time period, I have to give it credit for at least one thing: the monster has long hair, as he did in the novel.  Compare the following illustration from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein...  

to Boris Karloff's famous portrayal of the monster in the 1931 film version.

One of the advantages of the film adaptations is that we get to see the creation of the monster. In the 1910 film, the monster isn't created by assembling body parts from corpses and animating them with electricity, as his creation is portrayed in the 1931 movie.  Instead, the monster is created by a form of alchemy.

Despite its flaws, I think the 1910 film is kinda interesting.  It is in the public domain and is available for viewing at the Internet Archive.

By the way, this wasn't the only silent version of Frankenstein.

There was a feature-length (5-reel) version released in 1915 (and re-released with additional footage in 1916) called Life Without a Soul.  Unfortunately, the film is presumed lost, although at least one person has claimed to have seen a print.