Early American animation began as a marriage between the established art of comic strips and the emerging technology of cinema. By the advent of movies, many famous cartoonists were already supplementing their incomes by performing their art on the vaudeville stage. Two popular stage attractions were speed drawing and morph drawing (where the artist would start with one image and by adding bits at a time, end with a completely different scene.) Blackton, Emil Cohl and Winsor McCay were all successful cartoonist that had taken their skills to vaudeville. Though the great film “magician” Georges Melies used stop-motion as trick photography as early as 1902, what many consider the first animation is credited to J. Stuart Blackton in 1906 with the film “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.” This movie essentially shows Blackton drawing but does include some footage shot frame by frame as the drawing advances. The first purely animated film is Cohl’s 1908 film, “Fantasmagorie,” a dreamy, hallucinogenic film of morphing drawn images. Then in 1911, Winsor McCay brought animation to the popular masses by incorporating his popular comic strip characters in his films.