The earliest age of mainstream animation known to man, lasting from the early 1900s to the late 1920s with the rise of sound technology. Now, animation has existed for a very, very long time in some form of another before this era came about, but this era is obviously when large amounts of people actually started taking notice of the medium and what it could do. This is owed in part to the rise of the motion picture to begin with during this time period. The earliest known/existing cartoon as we know it is the 1908 French short film Phantasmagorie by Emile Cohl (while there were many experiments with stop motion and pictures earlier, this was apparently the first one to rely entirely on genuine hand drawn animation).