![]() ![]() McCay also inserted himself into the cartoon, thus combining live action and animation (imitated by the Fleischer brothers in their Out of the Inkwell series and by Walt Disney in his Alice in Wonderland silents). The cartoon would then roll, and McCay would put Gertie through her various “tricks” as if she were real and he was her trainer. McCay would enter the stage, cracking a whip, and calling forth Gertie. With these new tools and Fitzsimmons, McCay was able to create Gertie the Dinosaur, his most innovative, interactive, and enduring cartoon. ![]() McCay also invented the use of registration marks in the corners of the paper, so as to help maintain stability of the image when the actual photography took place (the paper and marks were later replaced as an industry practice with animation cels with registration pegs to do the same stabilization more effectively). He then went back and did what is called “inbetweening” or “tweening.” In the future, animation studios would use secondary artists to do these intermediary drawings, so as to allow their master animators to focus on the creative aspects of animation. McCay then produced one of the critical techniques in animation by doing the transitional points of animation (called key frames) first, to help lay out the overall action of the cartoon. McCay realized that he could not produce longer, more elaborate animations without assistance, so he brought in an assistant, John A. The ending is more charming, as Nemo and the Princess are carried away in the mouth of a friendly dragon, which has become a kind of throne. The animation itself only lasts about four minutes, and is largely a demonstration of stretching and squashing two of the characters at the behest of Nemo. Little Nemo is still worth watching, from the quaint ridicule that meets with McCay’s announcement that he can make pictures move to the somewhat silly behind the scenes creation of the cartoon. When the black and white release proved successful, McCay then hand-tinted the frames to further reproduce the look of the original Little Nemo comic. He mounted the rice paper on cardboard to facilitate shooting, then used a rotary machine to flip the cards so he could check the animation (another innovation, which can be seen in the short). McCay proceeded to use four thousand pieces of rice paper for his original cartoon, inventing the idea of numbering each drawing to maintain the sequencing. McCay realized the same principle could be used on separate film frames. The original idea came from his son playing with flipbooks, in which a child rifles the pages of a book rapidly with his finger, thus causing the individual drawings to appear to be in motion. McCay had already made a cartoon version of his famous Little Nemo in 1911, releasing it to both movie theaters and then using it in his vaudeville act. McCay was a very popular entertainer, but every vaudeville act needed a new gimmick now and then to keep things fresh.Īnd that’s where Gertie the Dinosaur lumbers into the picture in 1914. McCay would recite the famous lines “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” while he drew the faces of a man and a woman – and then aged the pictures until he reached the final lines. One of his favorite routines was based on Shakespeare’s monologue about “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It. McCay was also famous on the vaudeville circuit, where he supplemented his income as a cartoonist by doing what are still called “chalk talks.” With a large easel and a crayon, McCay would draw caricatures of audience members, or transform one picture into another while he kept up a comic patter. To this day, his Little Nemo in Slumberland has to be seen to be believed in all its baroque majesty. But animation historian Michael Barrier, the author of the indispensible Hollywood Cartoons, calls McCay “the first American animator of consequence” because he “made films that people wanted to see.” McCay had already been instrumental in helping to originate the comic strip in newspapers. Granted, McCay is not the first animator, American or otherwise (James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl tried the form sooner). As important as Walt Disney and Chuck Jones are in the history of animation as the ultimate masters of the form, McCay was the man who brought together many of the technical innovations that animators still use today, as well as being the first to create characters with whom audiences fell in love. McCay was one of those enormously important innovators who create whole new art forms. But the father of them all, and a man who deserves to be known as the father of American animation, is Winsor McCay, whose creation Gertie the Dinosaur was the very first dinosaur to be on the big screen. ![]()
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