Animated features have been big business since Walt Disney’s 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was that year’s top-grossing release. With the rise of digital animation in this century, the medium’s financial clout has grown even greater. In the past decade, at least nine animated films (headed by this year’s hyperrealistic version of “The Lion King”) have brought in more than a billion dollars each at the worldwide box office. Digital effects give animators vast powers to create extravagant fantasies; anything seems possible. Yet, with so much money at stake, the infinite capacities of the medium are often put to use for a narrow range of market-tested formulas.

To rediscover the spontaneity, the free-flowing imagination, and the uninhibited sense of fun at the heart of the medium, go back to its beginnings. Leapfrog over the age of computer-generated imagery and even the golden age of hand-drawn cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, and Mickey Mouse, and delve into the masterworks of the earliest years of animation. During the silent-film era, bold individualists tested the extremes of techniques that they may also have invented. Many of these silent cartoons are more than mere historical curiosities—they’re giddy delights that stand alongside such classic silent live-action comedies as those by Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. What’s more, quite a few of these films—which are in the public domain, their copyrights long expired—are hiding in plain view, for free, on YouTube and other sites (and are easily searchable by their directors and titles).

Yet a cell phone or a laptop computer only hints at the shock that Émile Cohl’s “Fantasmagorie,”1 from 1908, one of the first hand-drawn animated films, offered on the big screen. It opens with an extreme closeup of the artist’s hand leaping onto a black screen and rapidly drawing—a vision of artistry that heralded the power of the medium. Next, we see a clown dangling from a crossbar, and then, for two minutes, exquisitely controlled chaos reigns. A sprouting plant lifts off the clown’s head and delivers it to another man while the headless clown does gymnastics. A champagne bottle becomes a flower, which becomes an elephant’s trunk. Cohl’s hallucinatory shape-shifting was a thunderclap, revealing that animation could be used as more than just a curiosity. He inspired other caricaturists and comic-strip artists to follow him into the freewheeling realm of animation. Together, they forged a cinema of discovery, surprise, and wonder.

Just as live-action films surpassed their roots in photography and theatre, animated films—borrowing from comic strips, magic shows, and vaudeville—took flight and became a distinctive and mysterious kind of aesthetic experience. But their creators quickly discovered a particular obstacle to this aesthetic flowering: how hard the films were to make. Early live-action shorts, such as Sennett’s and Chaplin’s, could be filmed rapidly, even in a single day, with casual or nonexistent scripts. Each minute of an animated film, on the other hand, required at least nine hundred and sixty precisely sequenced drawings. And the finished movies, despite how labor-intensive they were, looked simple: line drawings on spare backgrounds.

Early animators responded to this problem by choosing to display the exacting process itself. Cohl filmed his hand as he made the drawings of “Fantasmagorie.” The illustrator Winsor McCay went even further with his first film, “Little Nemo,”2 which was an extension of his celebrated comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The film is mainly live action, a faux documentary that shows McCay meeting friends and accepting a gentlemanly challenge3 to make, within a month, four thousand drawings and set them in motion. He sweats under the pressure, enduring several mishaps.4 Near the film’s end, he starts up a projector and a drawing fills the screen under the rubric “ WATCH ME MOVE .”5 The animation is rudimentary but expressive: McCay’s famous characters—some of which are racist caricatures—begin to run and dance, stretch and shrink, as if in distorting mirrors, displaying both the realistic power of animation and its easy swing into fantasy.

McCay’s third film, “Gertie the Dinosaur,”6 introduced what became a beloved character, likely the first to be born in an animated film. Gertie, a lumbering and amiable beast, emerges from a cave.7 McCay renders her delicately, taking pains to have the small wrinkles of her body undulate with her breathing.8 The animator “talks” with Gertie in the title cards and, like a circus trainer, commands her to raise one foot and then another—and even draws himself as a tiny character entering the prehistoric landscape with her. The movie’s most inspired moment emerges from its severest limitation: the sparsely detailed background. When Gertie grabs a woolly mammoth9 by the tail and flings it into a lake, McCay exploits that blank space and shrinks the mammoth to minuscule size as it vanishes comedically far into the distance.

The first generation of animators often conjured up fictitious interactions with their hand-drawn characters. None did so more boldly than the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer—best known as the creators, in the sound era, of the “Popeye” and “Betty Boop” series—who thrilled to the vertiginous comedy of animated characters turning the tables on their creators. Their silent “Out of the Inkwell” shorts are delirious metafictions that show Max at work in his office, drawing a small clown who finds ways to escape the sheet of paper and make mischief in the outside world. In “The Tantalizing Fly,”10 the clown borrows Max’s fountain pen to clobber a fly, swings the pen, and scatters ink off the page—and onto Max’s face.11 “Bubbles”12 shows Max and the clown competing to blow the biggest soap bubble. The clown defies his creator by making a bubble in which he floats off the page,13 out the window, into the street, and down the radiator of a stranger’s car. In “Jumping Beans,”14 the clown makes a rubber stamp in his own likeness, cloning himself and overrunning the office15 with an army of clowns, who lasso Max and wrestle him to the floor.

The early spirit of experimentation in animation didn’t last long. In 1914, the producer J. R. Bray and the animator Earl Hurd began patenting the process known as cel animation, which was a crucial step in the industrialization of the art form. Bray also set up a studio to produce cartoons quickly, for wide distribution. “How Animated Cartoons Are Made,”16 from 1919, directed by Wallace Carlson, demonstrates the way this commercialization curtailed the animator’s freedom. Carlson appears onscreen, explaining (in a title card), “The first thing to do is to get an O.K. on the scenario”;17 he then knocks on a door labelled “ J. R. Bray .” Later, we are shown a title card that reads, “After the film is developed and printed, the cartoon is projected for criticism.”18 Bray appears onscreen, ordering Carlson to make a change to one scene.

Carlson concludes the self-deprecating comedy with barely concealed exasperation: a title card reading, “Just as soon as we correct that ‘run’ and do the other sixty-two scenes, we’ll be glad to have you see the picture.”19 The sadness that tinges this gag is brought to the fore by the charm and verve on display in “He Resolves Not to Smoke,”20 a cartoon that Carlson made four years earlier for the Essanay studio, where Chaplin also worked at the time.

It’s a sweet-toned anecdote, about a street-smart boy named Dud and his dog, that’s spiced with a slangy pugnacity. The dog does tricks21 that are depicted with a mischievous joy—walking on its front legs and standing on its head. Dud’s mustachioed father sits in an armchair, savoring his solitude with a similar gestural glee: he puffs on a pipe, flips his slipper22 into the air and back onto his foot, blows smoke rings and inhales them—and then dozes off. Peering into the window, Dud decides to pilfer the pipe. When he’s tempted to smoke it, the comedy meshes homespun morals with cosmic leaps of fancy. Puffs of smoke form visions,23 both alluring and menacing, until the diabolical “spirit of smoke” vows to teach Dud a lesson—and lifts him from the ground, through the clouds, to the moon,24 while the dog cries and literally floods the street with its tears.

Perhaps the most revelatory career in early animation was that of Gregory La Cava, who started as a newspaper cartoonist and—before he moved over to live-action films—directed dozens of animated shorts. One of them foreshadows La Cava’s grand achievements as a director of feature films. (His most acclaimed works are the screwball comedy “My Man Godfrey” and the comedic drama “Stage Door.”) The title of that cartoon, “The Breath of a Nation,”25 winks at D. W. Griffith’s grotesquely racist drama, but it’s actually a comedy about Prohibition, released in 1919.

In “Breath,” La Cava unfurls a whirligig profusion of clever twists and tricks. The film is part of a series of cartoons featuring the roundheaded Judge Rummy and his friend Silk Hat Harry. The premise takes on the stereotype of the henpecked husband, yet the tale makes it clear that the judge is in need of some serious pecking. As Rummy’s domineering wife is dragging him to a temperance meeting—where he’ll serve as “the horrible example”26—he sneaks off to Harry’s soda fountain, which is a front for a speakeasy. Though the comedy is as readily suited to live action, La Cava’s animation inflects the film’s basic situations with delightful impossibilities, as when a crowd of bibulous patrons27 suddenly materializes behind, beside, and beneath a broad-shouldered barroom customer; a cantankerous drunkard ties a lamppost into a knot,28 sending the terrified Rummy scurrying horizontally up a wall; and Harry, under the withering gaze of Rummy’s wife, shrinks into his hat. The characterizations and gags in this film set the template for the coming generations of cartoon comedy.

Much of early animation has been lost, such as the pioneering films of Helena Smith Dayton. But the surviving animation of the silent era offers a wide range of pleasures, including clay animation, which is showcased in the Chinese-American artist Joseph Sunn’s “Green Pastures,”29 and which Wallace McCutcheon merged with live action in “The Sculptor’s Nightmare”;30 the lyrical stop-motion with dolls in “Mary & Gretel,”31 by Howard S. Moss; the geometrical abstractions of Walter Ruttmann’s “Opus 1”;32 and the intricate and interactive silhouettes in Lotte Reiniger’s “Cinderella”33 and the rowdily antic ones of Bryant Fryer’s “Follow the Swallow.”34 These, too, and many others in the genre, are freely available online, waiting to inspire anew. They stand as a forgotten canon of expanded imagination, from a time like the present one in animation, when anything seems possible. ♦