Studio: Winsor McCay
Distributor: Box Office Attractions Company (theatrical version)
Short Synopsis
In the theatrical version, a live-action prologue shows McCay and fellow cartoonists on an outing to a natural history museum, where McCay bets that he can bring a dinosaur to life. He goes away and draws thousands of pictures, then hosts a dinner to show the result. On his drawing pad, Gertie, a brontosaurus, pokes her head out from behind rocks by a lake. McCay, through intertitles, gives her commands: she bows, raises a foot, and sometimes sulks or ignores him. When scolded she cries. She swallows a tree, plays with a passing woolly mammoth and tosses it into the lake, and drinks the lake dry. At the end McCay himself walks into the drawing, climbs onto her back and rides away with her.
Why It Matters
- Gertie has a personality and weight. She breathes, shifts her balance as she moves, and her belly heaves as she drinks. That combination of character and physical believability is what separates this film from the trick films before it, and her pouting is still funny.
- It introduced practical methods that animation studios adopted as standard: keyframes with in-betweens, registration marks, tracing paper and reusable animation loops. McCay's film influenced the Fleischers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz and Walt Disney, and it was added to the U.S. National Film Registry in 1991.
Notes and Trivia
- On stage, McCay stood beside the screen with a whip and gave Gertie live commands; at the climax he stepped behind the screen and appeared to walk into the picture. The prologue and intertitles were added after William Randolph Hearst limited his vaudeville work.
- McCay chose a dinosaur partly to answer critics who claimed his earlier animation was traced from photographs: nobody could have filmed a brontosaurus.
- A sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), was abandoned after about a minute of footage.
- See also: How a Mosquito Operates (1912).