Gertie the Dinosaur

Template:Short description Template:Featured article Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use American English Template:Infobox film Gertie the Dinosaur is an animated short film released in 1914 by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the first animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay initially presented the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie performed tricks at her master's command. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed his vaudeville activities, prompting McCay to add a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release, which was renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (Template:Circa), after producing about a minute of footage.

Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had previously made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The American J. 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". Gertie was the first film to employ several animation techniques, like keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators, including the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques. It is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films, some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments. In 1991, the U.S. Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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Background

A black-and-white photograph of a seated middle-aged, balding man in a suit and tie, head leaning lightly on his right hand

Winsor McCay (pictured in 1906) was a pioneer in comic strips and animation.

Winsor McCay (Template:Circa – 1934)Template:Efn had already worked prolifically as a commercial artist and cartoonist by the time he began creating newspaper comic strips such as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–1911)Template:Efn and his signature strip Little Nemo (1905–1914).Template:Efn Template:Sfn In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit as well, doing chalk talks—performances in which he drew pictures before live audiences.Template:Sfn

Inspired by the flip books his son brought home,Template:Sfnm McCay recognized the potential to create "moving pictures" from his cartoons.Template:Sfn He claimed to be the first man in the world to make animated cartoons,Template:Sfn but he was preceded by the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl.Template:Sfn McCay's first film starred his Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911; he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act.Template:Sfn He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates,Template:Sfn in which a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man.Template:Sfnm McCay gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmarish situation.Template:Sfn His animation was criticized as being so lifelike that he must have traced the characters from photographsTemplate:Sfn or resorted to tricks using wires.Template:Sfn To show that he had not, McCay chose for his next film a creature that could not have been photographed.Template:Sfn

In 1912, McCay consulted with the American Historical Society and announced plans to create a presentation featuring depictions of the great monsters that once roamed the earth.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He spoke of the "serious and educational work" that the animation process could enable.Template:Sfn McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, like the March 4, 1905,Template:Efn Template:Sfn episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race,Template:Sfnm and the May 25, 1913,Template:Efn 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.Template:Sfnm In the September 21, 1913,Template:Efn 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.Template:Efn Template:Sfn

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McCay considered several names before settling on "Gertie"; his production notebooks used "Jessie the Template:Not a typo". Disney animator Paul Satterfield recalled hearing McCay in 1915 relate how he had chosen the name "Gertie":Template:Sfn

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Content

Animated film of a trained dinosaur

Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur.Template:Sfn Its star, Gertie, performs tricks much like a trained elephant. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time: she breathes rhythmically, shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. McCay imbued her with a personality—while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands.Template:Sfn

Synopsis

The frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave after being called by her master McCay, eating a boulder and a tree on the way. The whip-wielding McCay orders her to do tricks like raising her foot or bowing to the audience. After being distracted by a sea serpent, Gertie nips back at her master. McCay scolds Gertie for this, which makes her cry, and he subsequently placates her with a pumpkin.Template:Efn Gertie eats the leftover tree trunk, and tosses a mammoth named Jumbo into the lake; when Jumbo teases her by spraying her with water, she hurls a boulder at it as it swims away. After a flying lizard catches Gertie's attention, she quenches her thirst by draining the lake. McCay then has her carry him offstage while he bows to the audience.Template:Sfn

In the live-action framing story added for later distribution, McCay and friends suffer a flat tire in front of the American Museum of Natural History. They enter the museum and, while viewing a Brontosaurus skeleton, McCay wagers a dinner that he can bring a dinosaur to life with his animation skills. The animation process and its "10,000 drawings, each a little different from the one preceding it" is put on display,Template:Efn Template:Sfn with humorous scenes of mountains of paper, some of which an assistant drops.Template:Sfn When the film is finished, the friends gather to view it in a restaurant.Template:Sfn

Production

A black and white drawing from an animated cartoon, with small crosses marked. A dinosaur lifts a man in its mouth.

McCay used registration marks in the corners of the drawings to reduce jittering.

Gertie was McCay's first piece of animation with detailed backgrounds.Template:Sfn Main production began in mid-1913.Template:Sfn Working in his spare time,Template:Sfn McCay drew thousands of frames of Gertie on Template:Convert sheets of rice paper,Template:Sfn a medium good for drawing as it did not absorb ink. Since it was translucent, it was also ideal for the laborious retracing of backgrounds,Template:Sfn a job that fell to art student neighbor John A. Fitzsimmons.Template:Sfn The drawings themselves occupied a Template:Convert area of the paper,Template:Efn marked with registration marks in the cornersTemplate:Sfn to reduce jittering of the images when filmed. They were photographed mounted on large pieces of stiff cardboard.Template:Sfn

McCay was concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine the timing of Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's weight.Template:Sfn McCay consulted with New York museum staff to ensure the accuracy of Gertie's movements; the staff were unable to help him find out how an extinct animal would stand up from a lying position, so in a scene in which Gertie stood up, McCay had a flying lizard come on screen to draw away viewers' attention.Template:Sfn When the drawings were finished, they were photographed at Vitagraph Studios in early 1914.Template:Sfn

A black-and-white film still in the four corners. Three men in the center stand by a table on the right stacked with thousands of sheets of paper.

McCay's assistants preparing the thousands of drawings for the film, in a still from the film's introduction

McCay pioneered the "McCay Split System" of animation, in which major poses or positions were drawn first and the intervening frames drawn after. This relieved tedium and improved the timing of the film's actions.Template:Sfn McCay was open about the techniques that he developed, and refused to patent his system, reportedly saying: "Any idiot that wants to make a couple of thousand drawings for a hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club."Template:Sfn During production of Gertie, he showed the details to a visitor who claimed to be writing an article about animation. The visitor was animator John Randolph Bray,Template:Sfn who sued McCay in 1914Template:Sfnm after taking advantage of McCay's lapse to patent many of the techniques, including the use of registration marks, tracing paper, and the Mutoscope action viewer, as well as the cycling of drawings to create repetitive action.Template:Sfn The suit was unsuccessful, and there is evidence that McCay may have countersued—he received royalty payments from Bray for licensing the techniques.Template:Sfn

Release

Black-and-white poster announcing "Winsor McCay and his Wonderful Trained Dinosaur Gertie". A drawing of a long-necked dinosaur appears below the verbose copy at the top.

Advertisements educated audiences about dinosaurs.

Gertie the Dinosaur first appeared as part of McCay's vaudeville act in early 1914.Template:Sfn It appeared in movie theatersTemplate:Sfn in an edition with a live-action prologue, distributed by William Fox's Box Office Attractions Company from December 28.Template:Sfn Dinosaurs were still new to the public imagination at the time of Gertie's releaseTemplate:Sfn—a Brontosaurus skeleton was put on public display for the first time in 1905.Template:Sfn Advertisements reflected this by trying to educate audiences: "According to science this monster once ruled this planet ... Skeletons Template:Interp now being unearthed measuring from 90 ft. to 160 ft. in length. An elephant should be a mouse beside Gertie."Template:Sfn

Vaudeville

McCay originally used a version of the film as part of his vaudeville act.Template:Efn The first performance was on February 8, 1914,Template:Efn Template:Sfn in Chicago at the Palace Theater. McCay began the show making his customary live sketches, which he followed with How a Mosquito Operates. He then appeared on stage with a whip and lectured the audience on the making of animation. Standing to the right of the film screen, he introduced "the only dinosaur in captivity". As the film started, Gertie poked her head out of a cave, and McCay encouraged her to come forward. He reinforced the illusion with tricks such as tossing a cardboard apple at the screen, at which point he turned his back to the audience and pocketed the apple as it appeared in the film for Gertie to eat.Template:Efn For the finale, McCay walked offstage from where he "reappeared" in the film; Gertie lifted up the animated McCay, placed him on her back, and walked away as McCay bowed to the audience.Template:Sfn

The show soon moved to New York.Template:Sfn Though reviews were positive, McCay's employer at the New York American, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was displeased that his star cartoonist's vaudeville schedule interrupted his work illustrating editorials. At Hearst's orders, reviews of McCay's shows disappeared from the AmericanTemplate:'s pages. Shortly after, Hearst refused to run paid advertisements from the Victoria Theater, where McCay performed in New York.Template:Sfn On March 8, Hearst announced a ban on artists in his employ from performing in vaudeville.Template:Sfn McCay's contract did not prohibit him from his vaudeville performances, but Hearst was able to pressure McCay and his agents to cancel bookings, and eventually McCay signed a new contract barring him from performing outside of greater New York.Template:Sfn

Movie theaters

A black and white film still. A group of men sit around a dining table in the center. To the right, a man stands by and gestures at a large drawing of a dinosaur.

McCay sketches Gertie for his colleagues in a live-action sequence made for the film's theatrical release, at the American Museum of Natural History.

In November 1914, film producer William Fox offered to market Gertie the Dinosaur to moving-picture theaters for "spot cash and highest prices".Template:Sfnm McCay accepted, and extended the film to include a live-action prologueTemplate:Efn and intertitles to replace his stage patter. The film successfully traveled the country and had reached the west coast by December.Template:Sfn

The live-action sequence was likely shot on November 19, 1914.Template:Sfn It features McCay with several of his friends,Template:Sfn such as cartoonists George McManus and Tad Dorgan, writer Roy McCardell, and actor Tom Powers;Template:Sfnm McCay's son Robert had a cameo as a camera-room assistant.Template:Sfn McCay used a bet as a plot device, as he had previously in the Little Nemo film.Template:Sfn

2018 reconstruction of McCay's vaudeville act

Using extant original drawings by McCay, David L. Nathan reconstructed the lost "Encore" sequence from McCay's original vaudeville version. He initiated a restoration of the entire film and, with animation historian Donald Crafton, proposed a reconstruction of McCay's vaudeville performance.Template:Sfn Crafton, Nathan and Marco de Blois of the Cinémathèque québécoise worked with a team of professionals from the National Film Board of Canada to complete the project, which premiered live during the closing ceremony of the 2018 Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

McCay and animation after Gertie

McCay's working method was laborious, and animators developed methods to reduce the workload and speed production to meet the demand for animated films. Within a few years of NemoTemplate:'s release, Canadian Raoul Barré's registration pegs combined with American Earl Hurd's cel technology became near-universal methods in animation studios.Template:Sfn McCay used cel technologyTemplate:Sfn in his follow-up to Gertie, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).Template:Sfn It was his most ambitious film at 25,000 drawings,Template:Sfn and took nearly two years to complete, but was not a commercial success.Template:Sfn

Film fragments of the unfinished Gertie on Tour animated film

Fragment of Gertie on Tour (Template:Circa)

Around 1921, McCay worked on a second animated film featuring Gertie, titled Gertie on Tour. The film was to have Gertie bouncing on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, attempting to eat the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., wading in on the Atlantic City shore, and other scenes.Template:Sfn The film exists only in concept sketches and in two minutes of film footage in which Gertie plays with a trolley and dances before other dinosaurs.Template:Sfn

McCay made six more films, though three of them were never made commercially available.Template:Sfn After 1921, McCay was made to give up animation when Hearst learned he devoted more of his time to animation than to his newspaper illustrations.Template:Sfn Unexecuted ideas McCay had for animation projects included a collaboration with Jungle Imps author George Randolph Chester, a musical film called The Barnyard Band,Template:Sfn and a film about the Americans' role in World War I.Template:Sfn

In 1927, McCay attended a dinner in his honor in New York. After a considerable amount of drinking, McCay was introduced by animator Max Fleischer. McCay gave the gathered group of animators some technical advice, but when he felt the audience was not giving him attention, he berated them, saying: "Animation is an art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see, what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad Luck!"Template:Sfn That September he appeared on the radio at WNAC, and on November 2 Frank Craven interviewed him for The Evening JournalTemplate:'s Woman's Hour. During both appearances he complained about the state of contemporary animation.Template:Sfn McCay died on July 26, 1934,Template:Sfn of a cerebral embolism.Template:Sfn

Reception and legacy

Reviews

A color panel from a comic strip. A green-faced character in a colorful suit and top hat runs toward the bottom left corner from a four-legged, long-necked dinosaur which chases him. The green-faced character says: "I've a notion not to run! I'll bet he's a big boob! _But I'd better 'till I get to the beach."

A Gertie-like dinosaur appeared in In the Land of Wonderful Dreams on September 21, 1913.

Gertie pleased audiences and reviewers.Template:Sfn It won the praise of drama critic Ashton Stevens in Chicago, where the act opened.Template:Sfnm On February 22, 1914, before Hearst had barred the New York American from mentioning McCay's vaudeville work, a columnist in the paper called the act "a laugh from start to finish ... far funnier than his noted mosquito drawings".Template:Sfn On February 28, the New York Evening Journal called it "the greatest act in the history of motion picture cartoonists".Template:Sfn Émile Cohl praised McCay's "admirably drawn" films, and Gertie in particular, after seeing them in New York before he returned to Europe.Template:Sfn Upon its theatrical release, Variety magazine wrote the film had "plenty of comedy throughout" and that it would "always be remarked upon as exceptionally clever".Template:Sfn In 1994, Gertie the Dinosaur was voted number six of the 50 Greatest Cartoons by members of the animation field.Template:Sfn

New York Times film critic Richard Eder, on seeing a retrospective of McCay's animation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, wrote of Gertie that "Disney ... struggled mightily to recapture" the qualities in McCay's animation, but that "Disney's magic, though sometimes scary, was always contained; McCay's approached necromancy". Eder compared McCay's artistic vision to that of poet William Blake, saying that "it was too strange and personal to be generalized or to have any children".Template:Sfn

Gertie has been written about in numerous books and articles.Template:Sfn Animation historian Donald Crafton called Gertie "the enduring masterpiece of pre-Disney animation".Template:Sfn Brothers Simon and Kim Deitch loosely based their graphic novel The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002) on McCay's disillusionment with the animation industry in the 1920s. The story features an aged cartoonist named Winsor Newton,Template:Efn who in his younger years had a Gertie-like stage act featuring a mastodon named Milton.Template:Sfnm Gertie has been selected for preservation in the U.S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry.Template:Sfn

Legacy

A fake version of Gertie the Dinosaur appeared a year or two after the original; it features a dinosaur performing most of Gertie's tricks, but with less skillful animation, using cels on a static background.Template:Sfn It is not known for certain who produced the film, though its style is believed to be that of Bray Productions.Template:Sfnm Filmmaker Buster Keaton rode the back of a clay-animated dinosaur in homage to Gertie in Three Ages (1923).Template:Sfn

McCay's first three films were the earliest animated works to have a commercial impact; their success motivated film studios to join the infant animation industry.Template:Sfn Other studios used McCay's combination of live action with animation, such as the Fleischer Studios series Out of the Inkwell (1918–1929)Template:Sfn and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies series (1923–1927).Template:Sfn McCay's clean-line, high-contrast, realistic style set the pattern for American animation to come, and set it apart from the abstract, open forms of animation in Europe.Template:Sfn This legacy is most apparent in the feature films of the Walt Disney Animation Studios, such as Fantasia (1940), which included anthropomorphic dinosaurs animated in a naturalistic style with careful attention to timing and weight. Shamus Culhane, Dave and Max Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer, Pat Sullivan, Paul Terry, and Bill Tytla were among the generation of American animators who drew inspiration from the films they saw in McCay's vaudeville act.Template:Sfn GertieTemplate:'s reputation was such that animation histories long named it as the first animated film.Template:Sfn

Since his death, McCay's original artwork has been poorly preserved.Template:Sfn Much was destroyed in a late-1930s house fire, and more was sold off when the McCays needed money.Template:Sfn About 400 original drawings from the film have been preserved, discovered by animator Robert Brotherton in disarray in Irving Mendelsohn's fabric shop, into whose care McCay's films and artwork had been entrusted in the 1940s.Template:Sfn Besides some cels from The Sinking of the Lusitania, these Gertie drawings are the only original animation artwork of McCay's to have survived.Template:Sfn McCay destroyed many of his original cans of film to create more storage space. Of what he kept, not much has survived, as it was photographed on Template:Cvt nitrate film, which deteriorates and is flammable. A pair of young animators discovered the film in 1947 and preserved what they could. In many cases only fragments could be saved, if anything at all. Of all of McCay's films, Gertie is the best preserved, and has been kept in the U.S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" since 1991.<ref name="LoCongress">Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Sfn Mendelsohn and Brotherton tried fruitlessly to find an institution to store McCay's films until the Cinémathèque québécoise, a Canadian film conservatory, approached them in 1967 on the occasion of that year's World Animation Film Exposition in Montreal. The Cinémathèque québécoise has since curated McCay's films.Template:Efn Template:Sfn Of the surviving drawings, fifteen have been determined not to appear in extant copies of the film. They appear to come from a single sequence, likely at the close of the film, and have Gertie showing her head from the audience's right and giving a bow.Template:Sfn

File:Dinosaur Gertie's Ice Cream (29253987224).jpg

Gertie's ice cream stand at Disney's Hollywood Studios

McCay's son Robert unsuccessfully attempted to revive Gertie with a comic strip called Dino.Template:Sfn He and Disney animator Richard Huemer recreated the original vaudeville performance for the Disneyland television program in 1955;Template:Sfn this was the first exposure the film had for that generation. Walt Disney expressed to the younger McCay his feeling of debt, and gestured to the Disney studios saying, "Bob, all this should be your father's."Template:Sfn An ice cream shop in the shape of Gertie sits by Echo Lake in Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World.Template:Sfn The first known specimen of the dinosaur Chindesaurus, discovered in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park in 1985, has been nicknamed Gertie after the cartoon, although unlike Gertie, Chindesaurus is not a sauropod.Template:Sfnm

Notes

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References

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Works cited

External links

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Template:IMDb title
Gertie the Dinosaur at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on August 24, 2016
"Have You Seen Gertie at Disney's Hollywood Studios?" – article blog about Dinosaur Gertie's Ice Cream of Extinction
Example of Dino – strip by Bob McCay (attributed to Winsor McCay at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Full short at the Internet Archive

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