Oldest merperson movie

The oldest film to feature a merperson is La Sirène (France, 1904), aka The Mermaid, a silent movie by French film director Georges Méliès of the Star Film Company. In the movie, which runs for 3 minutes 58 seconds, Méliès plays a magician who performs a series of magic tricks including conjuring a mermaid from a fish tank, whom he transforms into a woman.

Méliès was one of the pioneers of cinematography, producing approximately 520 films between 1897 and 1912. Defining features of his work include fantastic scenarios, dissolves, multiple exposures, pyrotechnics, substitution splices and the creation of stage machinery.

Released in 1904, La Sirène is numbered 593–595 in the Star Film Catalogue. It is typical of Méliès' cinematic work, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy by utilizing the possibilities of the emerging art form of film to entertain and inspire. The film is about a magician who begins by filling a fish tank with water. He then produces fish from his hat and puts them in the tank, transforming himself into a fisherman. Once several fish are in the tank, he produces rabbits from his hat and after a failed attempt to relax in a hammock (as the fisherman) he transforms back into the magician and brings the tank centre screen. A beautiful mermaid appears to be floating in the tank as it moves closer to the camera giving the illusion of travelling, it transforms into an underwater grotto as it does so. The magician crawls under the mermaid as she floats above him, playing with her hair and blowing kisses to the camera. He then transforms her to a woman, creates a shell bed for her to recline on, and changes himself into the sea god Neptune. Three more women dressed as sea nymphs appear to complete the scene.

The mermaid in the film does not wear a fabric or moulded tail; instead her tail is a two-dimensional painted prop, which the actress positions herself behind. Méliès repeats this technique on a greater scale in his 1907 production Under the Seas which features a chorus of double-tailed sirens and naiads.

The first film to feature a swimmable mermaid tail was most likely: The Mermaid (1910), a lost comedy by the Thanhouser Company; The Mermaid (1911), a lost short film featuring Annette Kellerman; or Neptune’s Daughter (1914) also featuring Annette Kellerman. Only a fragment of the latter survives. Kellerman’s Siren of the Sea (1911) features a sea nymph with legs rather than a fish tail, who resides in an underwater world created by painted scenery.