Studio: Winsor McCay
Distributor: Jewel Productions (Universal)
Short Synopsis
A live-action prologue shows McCay and his assistants at work, introducing the film as a record of a crime. The animation then follows the ocean liner Lusitania leaving New York and crossing the Atlantic. Off the coast of Ireland, a German submarine surfaces and fires a torpedo. It strikes, the ship lists, and passengers struggle into lifeboats and leap into the water as smoke pours from the funnels. A second explosion follows, and the liner goes down. Intertitles name some of the prominent people lost. The final images show a mother in the water holding her baby above the waves until both sink, followed by a title condemning the Germans who carried out the attack.
Why It Matters
- The sea is the achievement. McCay and his assistants animate rolling swells, billowing smoke and tiny figures falling from the decks with a density of detail no previous cartoon had attempted, and the drowning mother is one of the most affecting shots in silent animation. The fact that it is drawn makes it more harrowing, not less.
- It is the earliest surviving animated documentary and the first serious, dramatic animated film, re-creating a 1915 disaster that no camera recorded. At about twelve minutes it has been called the longest animated work of its time, and it was one of the first major American productions to use cels, which let McCay layer the moving figures over the ocean.
Notes and Trivia
- The sinking killed 1,198 people, 128 of them Americans. McCay was outraged, but the newspapers of his employer, William Randolph Hearst, played it down, because Hearst opposed American entry into the war. McCay paid for the film himself and spent nearly two years on it.
- It took around 25,000 drawings.
- It is an openly propagandist work, made while the United States was at war with Germany.
- See also: Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).