page_title: Winsor McCay
section_title: Animation (1911–1921)
hierarchical_section_title: Winsor McCay / Personal history / Animation (1911–1921)
caption_attribution_description: English: Still from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo film of 1911
context_page_description: Zenas Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for the comic strip Little Nemo and the animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. For contractual reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
  From a young age, McCay was a quick, prolific, and technically dextrous artist. He started his professional career making posters and performing for dime museums, and in 1898 began illustrating newspapers and magazines. In 1903 he joined the New York Herald, where he created popular comic strips such as Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. In 1905 his signature strip Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted—a fantasy strip in an Art Nouveau style about a young boy and his adventurous dreams. The strip demonstrated McCay's strong graphic sense and mastery of color and linear perspective. McCay experimented with the formal elements of the comic strip page, arranging and sizing panels to increase impact and enhance the narrative. McCay also produced numerous detailed editorial cartoons and was a popular performer of chalk talks on the vaudeville circuit.
context_section_description: McCay said he was most proud of his animation work. He completed ten animated films between 1911 and 1921, and three more were planned.
  Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons.  He claimed to be "the first man in the world to make animated cartoons", though he was preceded by others such as James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl.  McCay made four thousand drawings on rice paper for his first animated short, which starred his Little Nemo characters.  They were shot at Vitagraph Studios under Blackton's supervision.  Live-action sequences were added to the beginning and end of the film, in which McCay bets his newspaper colleagues that in one month he can make four thousand drawings that move.  Among those featured in these sequences were cartoonist George McManus and actor John Bunny.  Little Nemo debuted in movie theatres on April 8, 1911, and four days later McCay began using it as part of his vaudeville act.  Its good reception motivated him to hand-color each of the frames of the originally black-and-white animation.
  McCay had become frustrated with the Herald, partly over money issues and partly because he perceived a lack of freedom.  He accepted a higher-paying offer in spring 1911 from Hearst at the New York American and took Little Nemo's characters with him.  The Herald held the strip's copyright, but McCay won a lawsuit that allowed him to continue using the characters, which he did under the title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams.  The Herald was unsuccessful in finding another cartoonist to continue the original strip.
  McCay began work that May on his next animated film, How a Mosquito Operates, based on a Rarebit Fiend episode from June 5, 1909, in which a man in bed tries in vain to defend himself from a giant mosquito, which drinks itself so full that it explodes.  The animation is naturalistic—rather than expanding like a balloon, with each sip of blood the mosquito's abdomen swells according to its body structure.  The film was completed in January 1912, and McCay toured with it that spring and summer.
  Gertie the Dinosaur debuted in February 1914 as part of McCay's vaudeville act.  McCay introduced Gertie as "the only dinosaur in captivity", and commanded the animated beast with a whip.  Gertie seemed to obey McCay, bowing to the audience, and eating a tree and a boulder, though she had a will of her own and sometimes rebelled.  When McCay admonished her, she cried.  McCay consoled her by throwing her an apple—in reality pocketing the cardboard prop apple as a cartoon one simultaneously appeared on screen.  In the finale, McCay walked offstage, reappeared in animated form in the film, and had Gertie carry him away.  Producer William Fox's Box Office Attractions obtained distribution rights to a modified version of Gertie that could be played in regular movie theaters.  This version was prefaced with a live-action sequence and replaced the interactive portions with intertitles.
  Gertie was McCay's first piece of animation with detailed backgrounds.  McCay drew the foreground characters, while art student neighbor John A. Fitzsimmons traced the backgrounds.  McCay pioneered the "McCay Split System" of inbetweening, 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.  McCay refused to patent his system, and was sued in 1914 by animator John Randolph Bray, who took advantage of McCay's lapse by patenting many of McCay's techniques, including the use of registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and the cycling of drawings to create repetitive action.  The lawsuit was unsuccessful, and there is evidence that McCay may have countersued—he thereafter received royalty payments from Bray for licensing the techniques.
  Hearst was disappointed with the quality of McCay's newspaper work.  Infuriated that he couldn't reach McCay during a vaudeville performance, Hearst pulled from his papers advertising for th
caption: McCay in a scene from his first animated film, Little Nemo (1911)
exif: {}