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Directed and written by Charles R. Bowers, Harold L. Muller and Ted Sears (Bowers Comedy Corporation, 1926, U.S.A.)
24 minutes (part live action)
Charley Bowers is one of the oddest people in animation history. In the silent era, he worked on hundreds of Mutt and Jeff cartoons before creating a series of films with pioneering combinations of live action and stop motion. But he promptly sank into obscurity, only to resurface in the late 60s when copies of his films were found in France (where his film persona was named "Bricolo") by film historian Raymond Borde. The films were subsequently greeted with a warm reception at the Annecy Animation Festival.
Egged On sees Bricolo hitting on a brilliant idea after an accident involving an egg landing on his head: if eggs in their natural state are too fragile, then the world needs a machine that'll make them unbreakable! He approaches several potential investors, but is forcibly ejected by each of them - chiefly because he insists on demonstrating his point by smashing eggs in their offices. Help comes in the form of a girl who invites him to complete his machine at her father's farm; his new hosts, however, aren't all so pleased with their eccentric new guest.
In terms of comic acting and directorial ability, Bowers isn't on the level of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. His characterisations are unmemorable, while his storytelling and pacing tend to be muddled. But to make these accusations would be to miss the point: the concepts behind his films are witty and imaginative, and above all, Bowers has an eye for the absurd that makes Charlie Chaplin eating his boots look positively mundane. This can be seen throughout Egged On, from the sight of Bricolo shoulder-deep in rejected designs for his machine to the Rube Goldberg-like contraption that eventually results. But the pièce de résistance comes when, after making several unsuccessful attempts to transport eggs to his machine, Bricolo resorts to slipping a batch under his car bonnet. On arrival, he opens it only to find that the heat from the engine has caused the eggs to hatch - into a brood of baby cars.
This is the single animated sequence that bagged the film a place in Annecy's list of the 100 greatest animated shorts. It's a brilliantly constructed piece of stop motion: first, the eggs roll about on top of the engine. Next, they hatch - not immediately into cars, but into tiny balls of scrunched-up metal which proceed to unfold, Transformer-style, into their final form. One of these balls, having trouble hatching, sprouts a pair of chicken-like legs and swings about on the bonnet to shake off the last piece of shell. To cap the scene off, Buraccino's car drops down to incubate its young, leaving a single baby car stuck outside trying to get underneath.
This sequence alone more than makes up for any flaws in the rest of the film. Bowers was continuing the legacy of the trick film: the short movies from enterprising filmmakers such as Georges Méliès and Walter R. Booth that used just about every camera trick available for comical or fantastic effect. Trick films died out as movies began to get longer and more sophisticated, but Egged On shows that there was still life in the genre in the era of Chaplin and Keaton. And on the other side of the timeline, Charley Bowers' films can be compared to modern surrealist cinema; in particular, his use of stop-motion animation prefigures that of Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer's The Flat, come to think of it, is rather Bowers-sque. Egged On isn't really Charley Bowers' best film; the animated sequences in his later films are even more elaborate. But this is still an immensely intriguing piece of film history, and it's hard not to feel that Charley Bowers should be as well-known as his more revered contemporaries.
