 Walter Booth, born in Worcester on 12 July 1869, was a porcelain painter and an amateur magician, who joined the magic company at the Egyptian Hall in London in the 1890s. Booth became a producer of trick films for Robert Paul in 1899, creating such novel titles as Upside Down; or The Human Flies (1899) and A Railway Collision (1900). The Devil in the Studio (1901) introduced both hand-drawing techniques that pointed the way to animated cartoons, and a taste for the fantastical that showed the influence of Georges Méliès. The Méliès influence was further shown in The Voyage of the Arctic (1903) and The '?' Motorist (1906), where the motorist drives around the rings of Saturn. In 1906, Booth moved to the Charles Urban Trading Company. He established his own studio in his garden at Isleworth, London, with Harold Bastick as his cameraman. Notable among the films produced there were the first British animated film, The Hand of the Artist (1906), The Sorcerer's Scissors (1907) and When the Devil Drives (1907). His invasion fantasies, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909) and The Aerial Submarine (1910), are entertaining proto-science fiction fables in the Jules Verne mould. Booth left Urban by 1915 and went on to produce advertising films. Little is known of his subsequent career and he died in Birmingham in 1938. Imaginative, playful and technically adept, Booth is one of the most underrated filmmakers of the early British cinema period. Bibliography
Barnouw, Erik, The Magician and the Cinema (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Gifford, Denis, British Animated Films (Jefferson/London: McFarland, 1987)
Luke McKernan, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors
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