A short while ago I wrote my first post for the Norwich Film Festival's blog, focusing on Arthur Melbourne-Cooper and the dispute over whether Matches Appeal and his other animated matchstick shorts were made in 1899 and 1915. I picked Cooper as a subject because the information about him available online is somewhat scanty - and contentious too, as this anonymous edit to his Wikipedia article demonstrates.
The single best source for information on Arthur Melbourne-Cooper is Tjitte de Vries and Ati Mull’s 2009 book They Thought it was a Marvel. This is one of the most remarkable books on animation I've read: the authors succeeded in penning a volume of over five hundred pages on a man whose combined extant filmography clocks in at under half an hour. This is a testament both to the scholarship of de Vries and Mull and to the genius of Melbourne-Cooper, whose films are still able to charm and fascinate today.
