Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation

Robots seem to have been much on the pub­lic mind back in the nine­teen-thir­ties. Matt Novak at Pale­o­fu­ture gives the exam­ple of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in news­pa­per sto­ries about a robot that had done the unthink­able: a mechan­i­cal man had shot its inven­tor.” Despite being a typ­i­cal exam­ple of the exper­i­men­tal-fic­tive jour­nal­is­tic style of that era, it nev­er­the­less reflect­ed “a time when robots rep­re­sent­ed some­thing fear­ful,” and were indeed “a potent sym­bol of run­away automa­tion and job loss.” Novak cites the sta­tis­tic that “about 25% of job­less Amer­i­cans thought automa­tion was to blame for their unem­ploy­ment by the end of the Great Depres­sion.”

Not much more than a decade after the very term robot was coined, in Czech play­wright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., robots were in need of some good PR. Enter Shell Oil, which had not only the resources to com­mis­sion an eye-catch­ing adver­tis­ing film, but also a robot-shaped emblem famil­iar to many con­sumers.

“The Birth of the Robot,” which made its the­atri­cal debut in 1935, tells that char­ac­ter’s ori­gin sto­ry in hyper-sat­u­rat­ed Gas­par­col­or, begin­ning with the very motor of existence–turned by the hand of Old Father Time–while Venus plays her music out toward the stars. We then descend to Earth to find a motorist hap­pi­ly careen­ing around the Egypt­ian desert, not just between but over the Pyra­mids. (Tourism must have been dif­fer­ent in those days.)

Then a storm hits, at which point even the least atten­tive view­er will notice the strik­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of “The Birth of the Robot“ ‘s visu­al style. It was ani­mat­ed in stop motion by a New Zealan­der named Len Lye, who was already known for shorts like “A Colour Box” and “Kalei­do­scope,” fund­ed, respec­tive­ly, by the Unit­ed King­dom’s Gen­er­al Post Office and Impe­r­i­al Tobac­co. Tak­ing a con­sid­er­able nar­ra­tive and aes­thet­ic step for­ward from those, Lye pro­duces a charm­ing, fan­ci­ful result from what was clear­ly a labo­ri­ous process. Despite hav­ing been reduced to bones in the sand, our pro­tag­o­nist is even­tu­al­ly brought back to life by a few drops of Shell oil, albeit not in human but in humanoid robot form — and ready to show off a few moves that, today, would belong in a Boston Dynam­ics com­mer­cial.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Word “Robot” Orig­i­nat­ed in a Czech Play in 1921: Dis­cov­er Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots)

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

Watch a Visu­al Sym­pho­ny of Every­day Objects in the French Stop Motion Film Grands Canons

Watch Gum­ba­sia, the Jazzy Stop Motion Film That Gave Birth to Gum­by (1955)

The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): The Tru­ly Weird Ori­gin of Mod­ern Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion

Hard­er Than It Looks: How to Make a Great Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion

Oil’d, by Chris Har­mon

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.