Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics

Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911)

*** (out of 4)

This first Winsor McCay film is certainly more interesting for its historic purpose than pure entertainment but film buffs will certainly want to check it out. The film opens up in live animation as McCay is in a club with his rich friends who laugh at the idea of his drawings coming to life. McCay goes away to his studio and comes back a month later to win his bet that his Little Nemo character could actually move like a real person. This film actually works as both a documentary as well as an animation piece. The documentary point works well because it allows us to see McCay doing some of his drawings and it gives you a nice idea of his drawing style. The animation bits are truly magical once they happen and it really makes you wonder how impressive they must have been in 1911. The best way to describe them is to compare them with the SeptaTone to color in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Once the animation jumps off the screen it just brings a real freshness to the material and it hasn't dated one bit.

This is an interesting and creative little feature showcasing the work of animation pioneer Winsor McCay. There is a mini-plot built around McCay and his drawings, and the story is itself good for a couple of smiles, but the real highlight is in the animation displays themselves. There's no telling how fascinating this must have been to its original audience, and it is still entertaining to watch as you see the way that his ideas come together. All in all, this is an interesting historical curio that is definitely worth seeing.

This is a very early cartoon, but it starts off in a most peculiar manner. The cartoon's creator, Winsor McCay, is shown talking to a group of friends about his creations--explaining a little about the process. Then, the camera goes to his studio and he shows some of the steps needed to produce an animated cartoon. Then in the final portion of the film, his cartoon comes to life and there are some amazing (for their time) animations that are also hand-colored. While none of this stuff will make you forget Looney Tunes or Disney, it is an amazing insight into the process and as such it's an item of extreme historical importance. Cute and watchable--even today.

By the way, when I saw the film again, I noticed that the very famous John Bunny was one of the people in the beginning of the film. While practically no one today would recognize him (other than cinema nuts like myself), this rotund man was perhaps the first comedian in film. Sadly, most of his movies have been lost over the years and he died rather young in 1915. I've seen just a few of his remaining films, but his round face is hard to miss in this film.

In the world of comic strips, Winsor McKay was easily one of the greatest artists of all time..and as an animator, his work is comparable. He was firmly convinced that he invented the animated cartoon, and although this is not the case, his work does stand alone. Take a good look at the work he did on the Lusitania sequence, and you will find that only the Fleischer Bros. Superman cartoons approach the realism in illustration, the light simulation, and the smooth, full animation. Also, you get a chance to see George McManus, creator of the "Bringing up Father" strip and a fantastic artist himself. If animation is your metier, it's required viewing..brilliant clear through.

McCay's cartoons are all beautiful. This was his first. Typically, the animation exists as a sort of meta narrative, while McCay himself appears in a miniature framing story where he is challenged to produce moving drawings in a certain amount of time. The same device appears in most prints of Gertie the Dinosaur. McCay was a lightning sketch artist and did performances of his swift drawings, so moving picture animation was really an extension of the idea of rapid sketching providing dynamic impressions of motion in his work. Restricted from travelling with his shows by the newspaper that didn't want to lose his cartoons from its pages, it also meant that he could diffuse his talents internationally despite being confined to New York for long periods at a time. The drawings in Little Nemo do not tell a story as such, but instead show characters delighting in their freedom to "stretch and squash", elongating their bodies to demonstrate the malleability of the medium. When Disney studios established its basic principles of animation which would be common to all of its anthropomorphised animal characters, "stretch and squash" was one of the variables which could be applied to a character to give it a distinctive movement. In Disney, the more comedic a character is, the more stretchy and squashy it will be. For McCay, the elasticity of the characters is a way of displaying their triumph over the usual physical laws governing organic bodies. McCay was not concerned with simplistic comedy, as can be witnessed most strikingly in 'The Sinking of the Lusitania'(1918). In the early days of animation, there was no rule which said animation had to be deployed solely for childish comedy, but the industry gradually forced into that pigeonhole to suppress its more (potentially) subversive elements. Kristin Thompson writes superbly on this subject if you're interested. A video and DVD is available featuring all of McCay's animated cartoons. Anyone interested in the history of animation, or early cinema in general, must see it all.