#egged on

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.