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

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 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.

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.

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.