Le Cheval de fer ("The Iron Horse") is a 1984 animated short film (seven minutes) from Belgium, directed by Gerald Frydman.
The title is an old name for the Transcontinental Railroad (see John Ford's film The Iron Horse), but despite an introductory montage showing the construction of the railroad, the bulk of the film is about flesh-and-blood horses. It's set about ten years after the two halves of the railroad met at Promontory Point in Utah in 1869. Leland Stanford, bigwig of the Central Pacific Railroad (the western half coming out of California) has made a bet. Stanford has wagered his friends that a galloping horse sometimes has only one hoof on the ground, while his buddies insist that a horse always has at least two hooves on the ground. But the human eye is incapable of telling, so, how to resolve the wager?
Stanford engages the services of landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge attempts to snap a photo of a horse in motion, but his picture is too blurry. The photographer is stumped, until he sees Stanford chop the tip off a cigar, which gives him an idea...which eventually leads to motion pictures.
Tropes:
- Artistic License – History: Well, it's a cartoon.
- Stanford's bet was that a horse actually got all four feet in the air during a gallop, losing all contact with the ground.
- Muybridge didn't take inspiration from a guillotine to rig up a system of camera shutters on strings that Muybridge held. He actually went straight to the tripwire idea.
- Although it's commonly believed that Stanford had made a bet about how horses gallop, there's no direct evidence of this.
- Blowing Smoke Rings: A self-assured Leland Stanford does this while placing his wager with his friends.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Stanford has a very 19th-century plutocrat's toy: a tiny guillotine which he uses to cut the ends off his cigars. Muybridge sees this and gets his idea to have a series of cameras with strings that he would pull.
- Fanservice: Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, included at the end of the short, happened to be of attractive naked people. (There's also a cat.)
- The Ken Burns Effect: The opening first two minutes shows the construction of the railroad as a series of pans and zooms of still pictures, Ken Burns-style. One bit shows a picture of an engine, which actually shakes to suggest a locomotive engine rattling down the tracks.
- Limited Animation: The bulk of the cartoon is drawn in a very Limited Animation manner. When Leland Stanford is introduced, all of him that moves is one eye that blinks and one arm that brings a cigar to his mouth. Other parts of the short are more animated than that, but not by much.
- Male Frontal Nudity: The clips of human motion included in the film include a couple of naked men walking around and, um, wrestling.
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue or narration, only explanatory title cards (in French).
- Stock Footage: The film ends with Real Life clips of Eadweard Muybridge's films of human bodies in motion—basically, the first motion pictures.
