She cries when he scolds her, and he placates her with a pumpkin. When she feels she has been pushed too far, she nips back at her master. Her whip-wielding master has her do tricks such as raising her foot or bowing on command. When her master McCay calls her, the frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave. McCay imbued her with a personality-while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time she breathes rhythmically, she shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. Its star Gertie does tricks much like a trained elephant. Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. In the September 21, 1913, episode of McCay's Little Nemo strip In the Land of Wonderful Dreams, titled "In the Land of the Antediluvians", Nemo meets a blue dinosaur named Bessie which has the same design as that of Gertie. McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, such as a March 4, 1905, episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race, and a May 25, 1913, Rarebit Fiend episode in which a hunter unsuccessfully targets a dinosaur the layout of the background to the latter bore a strong resemblance to what later appeared in Gertie. He spoke of the "serious and educational work" that the animation process could enable. McCay conferred with the American Historical Society in 1912 and announced plans for "the presentation of pictures showing the great monsters that used to inhabit the earth". His animation was criticized as being so lifelike that he must have traced the characters from photographs or resorted to tricks using wires to show that he had not, McCay chose for his next film a creature that could not have been photographed. McCay gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmare situation. He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates, in which a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man. McCay's first film starred his Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911 he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act. He claimed that he "was the first man in the world to make animated cartoons", though he was preceded by the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl. Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons. In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit, doing chalk talks-performances in which he drew before live audiences. 1867–71 – 1934) had worked prolifically as a commercial artist and cartoonist by the time he started making newspaper comic strips such as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–11) and his signature strip Little Nemo (1905–14). Winsor McCay was a pioneer in comic strips and animation (1906 photo). In 1994, Gertie the Dinosaur was voted #6 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 1991. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films-some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments-and has been preserved in the U.S. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney. Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films". 1921), after producing about a minute of footage.Īlthough Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had earlier made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour ( c. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay.
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