French animated film directors

Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the praxinoscope (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the zoetrope) and was responsible for the first projected animated films. His Pantomimes Lumineuses
premiered on 28 October 1892 in Paris. His Théâtre Optique film system, patented in 1888, is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used. The performances predated Auguste and Louis Lumière's first paid public screening of the cinematographe on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema.

Francis Masse, known as Masse (born 21 August 1948), is a French artist. In the early 1970s, he first became acquainted with his sculptures, then turned to animation and cartoons.

Jacques Rouxel (26 February 1931 – 25 April 2004), born in Cherbourg, France, was a film animator. He is said to have been on a par with Tex Avery. Rouxel is perhaps best known for his initially controversial animated French TV series Les Shadoks, which first appeared in 1968.
Rouxel graduated from the Lycée Français de New York in 1946 and obtained a business degree from the École des Hautes études commerciales.
He worked on the prototype of a special machine, the "Animographe", especially designed to accelerate the production of animated TV series.

Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939) was a French illustrator, comic book artist and animator. He became famous for creating the logo for Laughing Cow Cheese (La vache qui rit), and is one of the precursors of animal comics. His work has inspired many other artists, notably Hergé and Edmond-François Calvo.
A native of La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée, Rabier started to work as an illustrator for various newspapers after meeting political cartoonist Caran d'Ache. His first album for children was the story of Tintin-Lutin, published in 1898, which told of a young lutin or "imp"; here his main characters are human and not animals, as they came to be in later albums. His most famous creations are Gideon the duck and the characters he drew for Le roman de Renart.
He died at Faverolles, Indre, in 1939.