Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) Turns 100!
Gertie peeks out.
The world’s oldest animated dinosaur, Gertie, turned 100
this year. Gertie made her world debut
in February 1914, with the animated dinosaur appearing to interact with her
live creator, the brilliant artist Winsor McCay (1869-1934), on a vaudeville
stage in Chicago. Last month, I celebrated this important early
cinema anniversary at a Museum
of Modern Art film event
hosted by John Canemaker (who led the audience in a “Happy Birthday” sing-along!)
but I didn’t celebrate here on my blog, where I had really hoped to find the
time to compose a multi-part blog series.
Someday I may still get to it, but in the meantime, here are
my notes on subjects and questions that might reward future development:
—Pay tribute to a hundred years’ worth of changes to the exterior of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History (contrast
today’s museum with a screen capture from 1914?).
—Illuminate those dark interiors of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History to better
expose the museum! (Poor McCay was
hampered by a refusal from the museum staff to allow appropriate film
lighting.)
—Compare/contrast: From McCay’s personality animation of a
mosquito in How a Mosquito Operates (1912)
to the full-blown personality animation of Gertie.
On command, Gertie lifts her foot,
complete with animated shadow.
—What it would have been like to first-hand witness
McCay’s vaudeville act with its lightning sketches? And what would it have been like to have been
in one of the first audiences for Gertie
the Dinosaur, with McCay snapping his whip???
—Speculate on the vaudeville musical
accompaniment that would have added a third component to the multimedia
production (film, live performance, and live music).
—Explore Gertie’s
use of the screen as an extension of the vaudeville stage, with great depth of
field (a lake extending into the distance).
—What kind of a dinosaur is Gertie? This question
would naturally lead to an exploration of turn-of-the-century dinosaur
representation.
—What kind of a sea serpent is in the water? This
question would naturally lead to an exploration of turn-of-the-century sea
serpent representation.
—Gertie as a toddler. Gertie with a diagnosis of ADHD.
—Gertie as a puppy.
—Gertie’s size, and the question of whether
Gertie is treated to a pumpkin or an apple.
—The bizarre anatomy of the four-winged
pterosaur.
—And Gertie’s eloquent tail—a charming example of
McCay’s masterful ability to capture personality in subtle comic details.
Cartoon-blogging, essay 9 of 21 blog entries on 250 great animated short films
Donald's Tire Trouble (1943), directed by Dick Lundy.
This is the ninth of 21 essays inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.
My fellow panelist Waldemar Hepstein sent me two short
pieces: one on a classic Donald Duck short, Donald’s
Tire Trouble (1943), and one on a Porky Pig favorite, Kitty Kornered (1946). They seem to go together nicely and so I decided
to round them out with a short piece on one of my favorites, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) to comprise an entry
on the art of animating character and personality.
Donald’s Tire Trouble
(1943): Disney was known for respecting
and emulating the old live-action comedy greats in his cartoons, and he
encouraged his animators to do likewise. This film is a kind of animated cousin
to Chaplin’s One A.M. (1916) in that
both are essentially one man shows — rather unusual in either animation or live
action. (The Goofy ”How to” series is another kettle of fish.) Of course, both
the Tramp and the Duck must have their adversaries for comical conflict, but
here their antagonists are inanimate objects.
Donald’s Tire Trouble
was one of a mere handful of shorts that Dick Lundy directed for Disney following a ten-year
period as animator. In fact, Lundy is sometimes credited as being the creator
of Donald Duck, which might seem something of an overstatement as there were
several pivotal talents at hand in developing the Duck’s personality (Jack
Hannah and Carl Barks are other names that come to mind, and we shouldn’t
forget the original voice, Clarence Nash).
There’s no doubt, however, that Lundy was one of the most
important Duck developers, being in on the screen legend’s image from the very
beginning. For this reason, as well as the quality of Lundy’s work both as
animator and director, his relative obscurity even among cartoon buffs is both
sad and mysterious. In a letter to an animation historian, Lundy described his
modus operandi:
When
I was animating at Disney’s I was considered a personality animator. I always
tried to give the personality a comedy twist, with a gesture, a body action or
a twist of the mouth or head. When I animated dances I tried to put in the same
thing. Now with a funny personality leading up to a physical gag which was
funny (usually the way a character reacted) you usually ended up with something
twice as funny.
Which is a perfect description of Donald’s Tire Trouble.
Kitty Kornered
(1946): Made in the year that director Bob
Clampett ended his long tenure at Warner Bros., Kitty Kornered, while being as wild and Looney as any Tune, has an
easy-going feel to it. It’s almost as if Clampett felt he didn’t have anything
to prove anymore and could just have a ball with his inspired brand of Loonacy.
In the process, he introduced a new character, Sylvester the Cat, later to
become the special property of Friz Freleng and the team mate of Tweety.
The plot, such as it is, consists of a very familiar standby
of the classic Hollywood cartoons: The hero has his home invaded by pesky
animals and must do battle with them — in this case, it’s Porky Pig against some
nasty cats who just won’t take no for an answer. Throughout the film, speed and
silliness are the main watchwords.
At the finish, when the film has about a minute and a half
left of its running time, Clampett pulls a couple of nice tricks out of his
sleeve. The cats fake a Wellesian “Martian invasion” broadcast in a failed
attempt to scare Porky out of his house. As he turns in for the night, at first he takes no notice
that there are three Martians in bed with him, even after they fondly kiss him
good night. (Somebody somewhere must surely have written a doctoral
dissertation on all the kissing that goes on in the Looney Tunes!) It’s Porky’s
delayed reaction that provides the standout moment, a frenzied split-second
head-turning and eye-bulging — on a par with, though quite different from, the
famous reaction shots from Clampett’s colleague Tex Avery.
Apparently, in modern TV screenings of this cartoon, not
only have scenes of the cats smoking and drinking been censored out, but so
have the establishing shots of the cats being kicked out of various homes.
Waldemar Hepstein
Gertie the Dinosaur
(1914): While the medium of film was
still primitive in 1914, the artistry of Winsor McCay was anything but
primitive. A newspaper cartoonist of
peerless skill, McCay threw himself into the new medium of film animation with tireless
energy. A handful of animators had tackled the new craft before him, but McCay was
the first to create animated characters who appeared to take up real space, breathe
on screen, and display coherent and individualized personalities.
In addition to being a nationally famous cartoonist, McCay
established himself as a vaudeville star in the early 1900s. He drew rapid
sketches for adoring vaudeville audiences, amazing the crowds with his lightning-fast
skills. Gertie the Dinosaur is a vaudeville performer, too. She bashfully enters the frame as if onto a stage, coquettishly
playing to the audience. Her self-confident
walk as she strides to the foreground (the equivalent of the stage edge)
practically flirts with the audience. From
outside the frame, McCay issues commands and Gertie either chooses to obey or
follows her own whims. When McCay
reprimands her, she cries. She’s
part-toddler, part-puppy, and fully dinosaur.
McCay conceived of Gertie
the Dinosaur as a film to accompany his vaudeville act, with McCay
interacting with the dinosaur on the screen.
For these first vaudeville showings, there would have been no intertitles — McCay
would have issued his commands from the stage.
When the film went into wider release, a live-action prologue and
epilogue were added, along with the intertitles to the cartoon portion.
Maybe Gertie could have moved on to cartoon fame on
the order of crowd-pleasing personalities like Felix, Mickey, and Bugs. McCay planned a sequel called Gertie on Tour in 1921 and filmed some
of it, but there’s no record of any formal release. A tantalizing fragment remains. McCay gave up filmmaking that same year. He was a solo artist working in a medium that
was quickly moving in the direction of factory production. Over time, artists would learn how to work effectively
within this new production system, but it wasn’t for McCay. He was strictly a “one-man, one film”
auteur. Consequently, his films are
one-of-a-kind achievements — masterpieces in a primitive medium.
Support
the artists and the art of the animated short film! Gertie the Dinosaur is available for purchase on Winsor McCay – The Master Edition.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), a film by Winsor McCay.
Theoretically, it would seem like dinosaurs and dragons were tailor-made for the movies. But as filmmakers
quickly learned, believable giant monsters—with the stress on
“believable”—turned out to be difficult to capture on film. Therefore, most early films went the easy
route and excluded giant scaly beasts from their casts. Mary Pickford
became a star; T. Rex had to wait.
Fortunately, there were some uncompromising early visionaries who insisted their
art demanded the presence of a dinosaur or dragon.
McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur
dances for the camera.
First visionary:
Winsor McCay was an artist of dizzying talent, nationally famous for his
extraordinary “Little Nemo” and “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” comic strips. With his vaudeville background, McCay became
an early movie enthusiast and began considering the possibilities for animating
his drawings. His first major film success was a dinosaur cartoon: Gertie the Dinosaur.
Created in 1914, Gertie
the Dinosaur is a remarkably sophisticated hand-drawn cartoon.
The first version was five minutes in length and was designed to work in tandem
with McCay’s rapid-fire cartoon-drawing vaudeville act. While the film
was projected, McCay interacted with the brontosaurus on the screen. But
the real magic wasn’t in the mixed-media performance but rather the charming puppy-like
personality that McCay gave to Gertie, the first saurian star of the
screen.
McCay later revived her for a sequel, Gertie on Tour (1921), where Gertie left her original
prehistoric setting and toured contemporary America. While only a short fragment of the sequel has survived, McCay left tantalizing drawings of Gertie using the BrooklynBridge as a trampoline—four years before another
brontosaurus took a plunge off LondonBridge in The Lost World (1925).
An animated Buster Keaton
perched atop an
animated brontosaurus in The Three Ages (1923).
Second visionary:
Buster Keaton’s acrobatic comedy and movie-making prowess resulted in a string
of brilliant shorts and features in the 1920s. For his first self-directed
feature, The Three Ages in
1923, Keaton realized he needed a dinosaur. He envisioned a gag entrance
for himself, riding on the back of a brontosaurus and then scrambling to the top
of the dinosaur’s head to scan the horizon in a typical Keaton pose. As comfortable with special effects as he was
with slapstick, Keaton employed early stop-motion claymation to bring his
dinosaur to life.
Closeup of the dragon
in Siegfried (1924).
Third visionary:
Over in Germany,
up-and-coming film director Fritz Lang corralled the mammoth resources
available at UFA Studios to film a two-part Die Nibelungen, based on the legendary Norse stories of Siegfried,
Brunhild, and Kriemhild. The first of the two films, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), begins the
hero’s journey with the slaying of a dragon. Sparing no expense, Lang had the studio technicians
construct a massive 60-foot long puppet dragon, operated by a full crew
sweating inside the beast. The dragon appears to be based on the model of
the recently discovered Komodo dragons, dressed up with some dinosaurian spikes down its spine.
Fairbanks slays the dragon in The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
Fourth visionary:
American film star Douglas Fairbanks saw the Siegfried dragon and instantly knew he
needed a dragon, too. An
often-underestimated pioneer of commercial Hollywood,
the very athletic Fairbanks virtually invented
the Hollywood swashbuckler with The Mark of Zorro (1920), added grandeur
to the formula with the massive set designs for his Robin Hood (1922), and was on the lookout for an even bigger
project… He settled on an Arabian Nights pastiche, The Thief of Bagdad, with a plot that would easily incorporate a Siegfried-style
confrontation between hero and dragon. Working with production design
genius William Cameron Menzies, Fairbanks and his chosen director Raoul Walsh
were able to fashion a fire-breathing dragon that nearly lived up to its German
predecessor.
Not counting the Willis O’Brien work that we’ll get to soon (and maybe a half-dozen minor shorts by others), that’s just about it for dinosaurs and
dragons in the years preceding King Kong
(1933). It took considerable effort to make a believable dinosaur or
dragon in those days, and only a few film visionaries—those mentioned above—were
prepared to invest the time or money.
Surprisingly, the tremendous success of King Kong didn’t change things, with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood cinema remaining largely dino-free. Perhaps Kong set the bar too high.
Reference Sources
The Making of King Kongby Orville Goldner and George E. Turner
Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooperby Mark Cotta Vaz
Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Geniusby Steve Archer
Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1,Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2,Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner
All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkinsby Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)
Watch King Kong...
Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.
