Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1908
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘Le petit soldat qui devient dieu’ is a short film about a little tin soldier.
We watch him and the other tin soldiers leave their box, and perform some antics in front of a childlike drawing of a house. At one point the little soldier is left behind, when the others return to their box. Suddenly we watch him floating on a paper boat down the sewer, and on the Seine.
Apparently the tin soldier floats to the ocean, because in the next scene he’s found by an African boy and taken to his negro tribe, who are about to kill another black man. The chief licks the tin soldier and dies instantly. Then the other tribesman crown the other black man. The end.
‘Le petit soldat qui devient dieu’ is another one of Cohl’s early experiments in stop-motion, blending it with live action. Unfortunately, the short is the weakest of Cohl’s 1908 films: the tin soldier sequences are very static, all taking place against the same backdrop, and consisting of little more than soldiers marching. Moreover, none of the action makes sense. But the end is the worst: not only is this scene totally incomprehensible, the cannibals are but white men in blackface, and their characters are the worst cliche cannibals imaginable.
Watch ‘Le petit soldat qui devient dieu’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le petit soldat qui devient dieu’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 
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April 18, 2019 at 10:33
thekeystonegirlblogs
Highly amusing, but seems to carry a message… “Don’t lick ‘tin’ soldiers”, they’re actually made of lead! Love the way the old king is summarily disposed of, but we should not be too harsh on the Blackface element, as this was normal back in the early 1900s. The director was simply a man of his time.
April 18, 2019 at 11:48
Gijs Grob
“Don’t lick ‘tin’ soldiers” – now there’s some great advice :-D. And indeed, the blackface trope survived until the 1940s, and the cannibal trope never really ceased to exist… I’m not judging Cohl, but these tropes hamper the film’s universal appeal.