Little Nemo

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

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.

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.

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.

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.