Hacker Cinema
Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House
1921 · Film · short · 11 min
Directed by Winsor McCay
ComedyScience FictionAnimationFantasyAdventure
After eating a rarebit at a party, a woman has a strange dream in which her husband converts their home into a flying machine to escape having to pay the exorbitant interest on the mortgage, on a flight that takes them around the world and to the moon.
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Nope.
The first for mass public display was a technology called Théâtre Optique by Charles-Émile Reynaud in 1892. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre_Optique ... if you replace the word "film" with "moving picture" - which is what most non-technicians are thinking. ("film" refers to a specific family of technologies - a subset of the methods of creating moving pictures)
The feature film (which is something else again) in the article is magnificent, but it's not the first "animated moving picture of a length most would consider to be a 'story' (say >2 minutes) for viewing in a theater" by 35 years.
Here's one of the 3 original animated works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=426mqlB-kAY and yes, it was in color
Might as well drop my favorite from the era, McCay's Flying House (1921) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obnRKhgRFXA which is done in a novel speech bubble system ... similar to comics.
I love studying technologies before "standard practice" is ingrained. There's a time window of rapid innovation ... ideas that might have worked but weren't pushed far enough. It's facinating to see what people end up falling on as the standard fanfare. I've called this time window, "The period of play"