This is a pleasantly set-up Lumiere subject in which a toddler pothers around a bowl filled with goldfish. Its composition will please the viewer.
That sounds like the sort of thing you might read in a catalogue of Lumiere films issued about the time, hoping to make the exhibitors buy copies and show them often enough to wear them out and buy new copies. However, while it certainly has good composition, the lack of motion makes this a bad motion picture. Motion pictures were too new to have their own aesthetics and the Lumieres, coming out of photography, were learning them as they went along. Sometimes they nailed that combination of a frame in which things moved around constantly while remaining in composition. Sometimes, as here, they wound up with little more than a pleasant photograph.
That sounds like the sort of thing you might read in a catalogue of Lumiere films issued about the time, hoping to make the exhibitors buy copies and show them often enough to wear them out and buy new copies. However, while it certainly has good composition, the lack of motion makes this a bad motion picture. Motion pictures were too new to have their own aesthetics and the Lumieres, coming out of photography, were learning them as they went along. Sometimes they nailed that combination of a frame in which things moved around constantly while remaining in composition. Sometimes, as here, they wound up with little more than a pleasant photograph.