Studio: Vitagraph Company of America
Short Synopsis
The on-screen title is Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics. Most of the film is live action. At a club, McCay bets his fellow cartoonists that he can make drawings move. He goes to work, and the film shows the labour involved: barrels of ink, crates of paper, and a stack of four thousand drawings. A month later he presents the result to his doubting friends, and the film switches to animation. Flip, the cigar-chomping troublemaker from McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the jungle boy Impie tumble on to a blank white stage, stretching, squashing and distorting as if in a funhouse mirror; Impie assembles himself from slices falling out of the sky. McCay's drawn hand sketches a rose for the Princess, and Nemo and the Princess ride away in the mouth of a dragon. McCay wins his bet.
Why It Matters
- The animated characters turn and tumble in convincing perspective, with volume and weight, at a time when other animators were working mostly with flat outlines. McCay's portrait of his own diligence in the live-action half is also part of the fun: the film is about the sheer effort of making drawings move.
- It was McCay's first film, and its success, both in cinemas and as part of his vaudeville act, sent him on to How a Mosquito Operates and Gertie the Dinosaur. The characters' expressive movement distinguished it from earlier trick films, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2009.
Notes and Trivia
- McCay drew the 4,000 frames on rice paper. They were filmed at Vitagraph under J. Stuart Blackton's supervision.
- After its good reception, McCay hand-coloured the animated frames of the black-and-white film.
- McCay claimed to be the first person to make animated films, though Blackton and Émile Cohl had both preceded him.
- See also: How a Mosquito Operates (1912), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).