Studio: Winsor McCay (photographed at Vitagraph)
Short Synopsis
A nervous man glances around before going into his room and getting into bed. Behind him, a giant mosquito in a top hat and carrying a little bag flies in through the transom window over the door. It lands on the sleeping man, sharpens its stinger on a grinding wheel, and starts to drink. The man stirs and swats, and the mosquito retreats, waits and comes back, again and again. Each time it feeds its abdomen swells a little more. Giddy with the meal, it does push-ups on his nose and flips its hat into the air, and at one point it is so engorged that it has to lie down. It goes back for one drink too many, swells beyond its limit and explodes.
Why It Matters
- The mosquito is a character, not a moving drawing: smug, patient and calculating. It makes eye contact with the audience and waves, and McCay animates its belly filling according to its anatomy, so that it gets heavier and wobblier with each feed. That sense of weight was something no other animator of 1912 was attempting.
- It is McCay's second film and the first in which he told a story, moving on from the demonstration-style Little Nemo (1911). It is also the earliest known animation to use smear frames, drawings stretched across the path of a fast movement, a device that later became standard practice. The character work here leads straight to Gertie the Dinosaur two years later.
Notes and Trivia
- The story comes from McCay's own strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (5 June 1909), where a mosquito gorges on a drunk until it is too bloated to fly.
- Overgrown New Jersey mosquitoes, "Jersey skeeters", were a standing vaudeville joke, which gave McCay's audiences a familiar target.
- The film is also known as The Story of a Mosquito and Winsor McCay and his Jersey Skeeters.
- McCay first showed it as part of his live vaudeville act, where it was received enthusiastically.
- See also: Little Nemo (1911), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).