Le dernier cri des dessins animés

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.

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.

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.

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.