THE DANCING MIDGET (1902)
aka La danseuse microscopique
Article 4064 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-27-2012
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Melies magic short

A magician uses his comic relief servant to produce several eggs, from which he produces a tiny dancer.

I’m beginning to think that many of Melies’s shorts can easily be pigeonholed into several types. On top of his epics, there’s his dream movies and his magic shorts, this being one of the latter. These always feature a magician coming on and doing a handful of cinema-enhanced magic tricks. This is a fairly typical example; it’s entertaining, but nothing special.