page_title: How a Mosquito Operates
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: How a Mosquito Operates / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: 5 June, 1909, instalment of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay. A dream in which a mosquito gorges itself on the blood of a sleeping man, ballooning to gigantic proportions.
context_page_description: How a Mosquito Operates is a 1912 silent animated film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short depicts a giant mosquito tormenting a sleeping man. The film is one of the earliest works of animation, and its technical quality is considered far ahead of its contemporaries. It is also known under the titles The Story of a Mosquito and Winsor McCay and his Jersey Skeeters.
  McCay had a reputation for his proficient drawing skills, best remembered in the elaborate cartooning of the children's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland he began in 1905. He delved into the emerging art of animation with the film Little Nemo, and followed its success by adapting an episode of his comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend into How a Mosquito Operates. McCay gave the film a more coherent story and more developed characterization than in the Nemo film, with naturalistic timing, motion, and weight in the animation.
  How a Mosquito Operates had an enthusiastic reception when McCay first showed it as part of his vaudeville act. He further developed the character animation he introduced in Mosquito with his best-known animated work, Gertie the Dinosaur.
context_section_description: Winsor McCay (c. 1869–1934) developed prodigiously accurate and detailed drawing skills early in life.  As a young man, he earned a living drawing portraits and posters in dime museums, and attracted large crowds with his ability to draw quickly in public.  McCay began working as a full-time newspaper illustrator in 1898, and started drawing comic strips in 1903.  His greatest comic-strip success was the children's fantasy Little Nemo in Slumberland, which he launched in 1905.  McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit the following year, doing chalk talks—performances in which he drew in front of a live audience.
  Inspired by flip books his son Robert brought home, McCay said he "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons.  He declared himself "the first man in the world to make animated cartoons", though the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl were among those who had made earlier ones, and McCay had photographed his first animated short under Blackton's supervision.  McCay featured his Little Nemo characters in the film, which debuted in movie theatres in 1911, and he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act.
  The animated sequences in Little Nemo have no plot: much like the early experiments of Émile Cohl, McCay used his first film to demonstrate the medium's capabilities—with fanciful sequences demonstrating motion for its own sake.  In Mosquito he wanted greater believability, and balanced outlandish action with naturalistic timing, motion, and weight.  Since he had already demonstrated in his first film that pictures could be made to move, in the second he introduced a simple story.
  Vaudeville acts and humor magazines commonly joked about large New Jersey mosquitoes they called "Jersey skeeters", and McCay had used mosquitoes in his comic strips—including a Little Nemo episode in which a swarm of mosquitoes attack Nemo after he returns from a trip to Mars.  McCay took the idea for the film from a June 5, 1909, episode of his comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, in which a mosquito (without top hat or briefcase) gorges itself on an alcoholic until it becomes so bloated and drunk that it cannot fly away.
caption: McCay based the film on the June 5, 1909, episode of his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend comic strip.
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