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

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.

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 a really ingenious combination of vaudeville and cartoons. It starts with Winsor McKay making a bet that he can produce a moving picture within a month; then we see him loading up with giant barrels of ink, boxcarloads of paper etc., the whole slapstick routine. At the end, we see his drawings gradually come to life and we get a genuine little animated cartoon. Anybody who enjoys a good laugh will get a kick out of this one; it's a surprise to see that cartooning could be so sophisticated in 1911.

Suddenly seeing Little Nemo and his friends from Slumberland come alive took my breath away and almost brought a tear to my eye. This is pure cinematic magic: ingenuous, fantastic, and charming. Like peeping into a world of harmless ghosts and fairies.

As someone else has pointed out in this forum, the action of LITTLE NEMO unfolds unrestricted by narrative conventions. Nemo and Flip stretch as if they're waking, and for a viewer today, that's where the marvel is. Nemo wakes in 1911 into the world of moving, hand drawn pictures and, after so many years of neglect, he wakes, again, for us.

Well, I could just go on for days expressing my enchantment with this jewel from the past.

Musidora

Watching this short, it is still quite fascinating to see what Windsor McCay was able to do almost one hundred years ago. The action is still quite good and it entertains even without a story line. The "plot" is that McCay is going to make a cartoon-drawings that move. The animated short had its beginnings in the work of Windsor McCay and others. McCay's work of course is of historical importance, to be sure. But most of what I've seen holds up well today, particularly bearing in mind when it was made. Worth watching. Recommended.