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.

Winsor McCay, The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and his Moving Comics was a 1911 short I saw as part of the Landmarks of Early Film DVD. It was by far my favorite, beating out even the more popular Voyage to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery. This movie is simply perfect. A cartoonist is hired to draw thousands of pictures in order to make them into moving comics. Moving is used in two senses: the pictures actually move (animation), and they are surprisingly poignant. The comics that Winsor McCay makes are fantastic. Again, fantastic in two senses: They're weird, magical, and are fantasy. They're also funny and wonderful. This was the only short I watched twice. It was just so great to see the rigorous process of drawing a cartoon film by hand. A sort of educational film, catapulted into awesomeness through the light touch of the (in two senses) moving comic.

Hurray for Winsor McCay My Grade: 10/10

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.

Winsor McCay was a newspaper cartoonist for the New York Herald, drawing such famous comic strips as "Dream of the Rabbit Fiend" and "Little Nemo In Slumberland." He was a super fast drawer who displayed his skills on the vaudeville circuit, performing what's known as chalk talk, entertaining his audience with jokes while quickly drawing detailed art on his canvass.

His son brought home some flip books containing a series of drawings. When skimming the pages from front to back, the combined drawings would show its drawn characters moving. McCay felt he could do the same thing on film and took the challenge to create a movie cartoon of his characters. His result was April 1911's "Little Nemo," the first character animated short film in cinema. The movie's full name," Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics," combined live action with his cartoon. The 11 minute movie shows McCay betting his colleagues he could create a cartoon made up of 4,000 drawings within one month. A later scene has McCay with a stack of drawings in his office being disrupted by a curious kid. Finally, McCay finishes and presents his cartoon.

Originally, the cartoon was black and white. When McCay took the cartoon on his vaudeville circuit, the reception he received was overwhelming. He decided to paint the film frames.

The title of the longer version claims McCay's cartoon was the first in the world to make animated films. As seen, there were a handful of earlier animation drawings that used simple "chalk" white on black lines to show movements of nondescript characters. In McCay's "Little Nemo," he uses what's called expressive character animation, transferring his newspaper strips' characters who had personalities of humans onto the cartoon. This was a first in cinema.

McCay's laborious composite of 4,000 drawings onto rice paper would be one of the few times an animated cartoon required to have a drawing for each film frame photographed for the stop-motion camera technique. Other animators would soon come up with shortcuts such as using "Cels" and registration pegs to speed up and simplify McCay's individual hand drawings.

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.