First toon to break the 4th wall?

T

...::: Tzapu14 :::...

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Does anyone know what the first cartoon to do a "breaking the 4th-wall" joke was (ie, self-aware that theyre in a cartoon, talking to the audience)? Im pretty sure it was the classic Warner Bros. cartoons (too many examples to mention) though i also recall seeing an MGM cartoon that had a bartender standing in front of a picture of a nude and saying "i dont move for this entire picture". Any earlier examples ( I guess one could possibly count the out of the inkwell series as well)?
 
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think that Gertie the Dinosaur, which was released in 1914, involved someone standing in front of the screen and talking to Gertie, who would react accordingly. Like I said, not entirely sure if that's fact, but if it is that's probably the first.
 
I'd imagine there have pretty much always been cartoons that break the fourth wall. I think narrowing it down to the first one that ever did so would be quite the challenge, if not impossible.
 
I've been seeing a lot of really early animation in a history of animation class at school, and it seems that many of the first animated cartoons were fourth-wall breaking. A lot of them started by showing an animator's hand with a pencil as it drew the character onto the screen.
 
Yeah, I remember one even older than Gertie the Dinosaur that started with an artist drawing on a blackboard and then the picture moved.

IIRC, that's also the oldest surviving cartoon, so that's most likely the first one to break the fourth wall.
 
It's only 4th wall breaking if the cartoon decided to interact with the audience. If it just started to move around in it's environment without paying the audience any mind it's not a 4th wall breaker.
 
Even so, the first one was pretty early. The test film for the very first Warner Brothers cartoon, "Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid", was pretty much all fourth-wall gags. And I haven't seen any, but apparently Fleischer's 'out-of-the-inkwell' series was similarly comprised of fourth-wall-breaking stuff.
 
Well, I was thinking more "fourth wall" as in interacting with the artist.

So, it wasn't technically the fourth wall, more like a strange rarely-used wall in front of the fourth wall.
 
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