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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.