Pauvre Pierrot

Pauvre Pierrot, or Poor Pete, is the oldest animated movie that exists. Produced in 1892 by French inventor Émile Reynaud, it is not "colorized." This is the way it looked from its first exhibition. The story is best told from the top comment at YouTube. 

So a lot of people are asking how they had colour on film if this is from the 1890s? The answer is they didn't because this animation wasn't shot on film. In fact, if you really pay attention to the dates you'll notice that this predates the Lumiere Brothers's first films in 1895. 

So what is it then, and how did they do it? In simple terms, and as best as I can, here's how it works. So this "film's" inventor, Emile Reynaud, created an apparatus with a series of mirrors in the center that would be rotated by hand with a pair of reels. At the same time, and at the same speed, huge strips of transparent gelatin containing a series of hundreds of hand painted colour images, containing the characters, would be fed around the apparatus. The gelatin strips would have  perforations along the side which would fit into the tiny pegs on a metal wheel in the center that would keep things moving.

At one point along the apparatus there would be a light inside of a box with a lens that would focus the out going light onto a single one of the painted images on the gelatin at a time. Then, in sequence, these individual illuminated images would be reflected off of the spinning mirror in the center and into another lens where they would be focused again and reflected off of another mirror which reflected it onto a third mirror which would reflect the moving image onto a screen. 

Then, at same same time, another light and lens in a box (commonly called a magic latern) would illuminate and focus the image of the background and project it onto the same screen as the characters, hence the double exposure effect and why the characters seem slightly transparent.

Emile Reynaud, called this invention Le Théâtre De l'Optique (or The Optical Theatre) it followed the same principles as film projection which, again, wouldn't be invented until later, only instead of using black and white film, it used a series of colour hand painted images. The whole illusion was accomplished all with just an elaborate combination of light, mirrors, and magic.
 

(via Damn Interesting)