The Haras, a heritage site with a contemporary twist

Built in the 1880s and listed as a historic monument in 2007, the site was acquired by the City of Annecy in 2013. After 145 years closed to the public, the site was opened to the community, and over the past decade it has hosted temporary cultural spaces and events for the city and its residents.

The horse: the Haras' emblem and protagonist of pre-cinema.
The period when these buildings were erected coincides with another story: cinematography. The link between horses and animation films may not seem obvious at first glance, yet a happy coincidence weaves a narrative that resonates with the Haras d'Annecy.

The horse has always been a source of fascination throughout art history, from the prehistoric horse paintings in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave to Zeus, the equestrian symbol of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games opening ceremony. In the late 19th century, a controversy arose over how a horse gallops: does it lift all four legs off the ground at the same time? It is impossible to tell with the naked eye, and physiologists disagree. In 1878, photographer Eadweard Muybridge set up 24 cameras along a whitewashed equestrian track to capture the stallion's movement frame by frame and analyse its gait. Based on Étienne-Jules Marey's work on motion analysis, this experiment is part of the fascinating history of pre-cinema and its rapid development during the 19th century, leading up to the invention of the Cinematograph by Louis and Auguste Lumière in 1895.

Pursuing his research, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, an optical toy based on Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope, which reconstructs movement through viewing the phases in rapid succession. Muybridge made transparent glass discs on which he painted, or stuck images taken from his photographs, then projected them onto a large screen using a magic lantern. In 1881, he projected a disc showing a horse's skeleton.

Since then, the horse has symbolized the moving image: the plates from Animal Locomotion (Muybridge's series of photographic works) are preserved at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. As such, installing the Cité internationale du cinéma d'animation at the Haras d'Annecy holds symbolic significance. The horse joins the rabbit as the new mascot of the world capital of animation film!