 Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay said he "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons. His first animated film, Little Nemo (1911), was composed of four thousand drawings on rice paper. His next film, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), naturalistically shows a giant mosquito draw blood from a sleeping man until it burst. McCay followed this with a film that became an interactive part of his vaudeville shows: in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), McCay commanded his animated dinosaur with a whip on stage.
