Gertie makes her mark

The Spring Lake District Library in Spring Lake Michigan, Winsor McCay's hometown, recently held their annual bookmark making contest for elementary age students. This year kids were encouraged to create a bookmark featuring Gertie the Dinosaur. There were HUNDREDS of great submissions! Lots of budding artists reside in McCay's hometown. Here are a few favorites:

Gordy

Here's a funny parody of McCay's film "Gertie the Dinosaur!"
Bryan Brinkman, Dan Pinto, and Matt Gaston of Uber Street Studios bring us the misadventures of "Gordy."
(It's funny, but gross... Funny and gross? Funny because it's gross? Just a warning...)

Annecy 2008

Annecy is the world's largest Animation Film Festival, held annually in France. The event took place a few weeks ago, and there John Canemaker gave a presentation on "The Art and Life of Winsor McCay." Oswald Iten, an animator from Switzerland, was in attendance and had glowing praise on his blog for Canemaker's performance. I asked Oswald if he could expound on what made the the presentation so great, and he was kind enough to send in this report for us! Thanks Oswald!
(pictures via John Canemaker's site)

John Canemaker presents “Winsor McCay, his Life and Art” at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival

Imagine Winsor McCay’s first four films on a giant screen with live musical accompaniment (festival director Serge Bromberg on the grand piano) and background information provided by one of animation’s most accomplished historians.

John Canemaker’s highly informative and well-prepared lecture was illustrated by examples of McCay’s graphic and motion picture work on the big screen. On the basis of McCay’s first four (partly) animated films, Canemaker managed to explain not only McCay’s groundbreaking evolution in the field of animation but also how his showman skills were important to his success. In reference to the cartoonist’s extraordinary draftsmanship – he usually drew from top to bottom with almost no sketching even on poster sized pictures – Canemaker compared him Leonardo DaVinci.

With perfectly timed comments during the screenings of Little Nemo (1911), How a mosquito operates (1912) and Gertie the dinosaur (1914) the historian revealed interesting background information while helping a contemporary audience to fully appreciate and enjoy the gags and allusions. The presentation included McCay’s clearly staged live-action efforts to emphasize that he was the creator of what is on the screen. Canemaker pointed to the sense of weight McCay put into his early films decades ahead of Walt Disney. When Gertie empties the sea, for example, her body is not inflated but the ground starts giving way to the increasingly heavier dinosaur.

If you ever thought that Gertie was nothing more than a lengthy exercise of mere historical value, you should see John Canemaker presenting it the way it was intended: as a vaudeville act. Although he also showed the live-action intro that was made for “standard” theatrical exhibition, he then proceeded to take on the role of Winsor McCay and started telling Gertie to do some tricks. Whenever she didn’t follow his commands he called on the audience (almost 1000 people that afternoon) to encourage Gertie to be obedient. Suddenly strange looking parts such as back and forth loops or endless repetitions became understandable as either dancing or refusing to lift a foot on orders, for example.

While most experiments in character animation (squash and stretch in Nemo, weight and re-use of drawings in Mosquito) were applied expertly to Gertie, the background still had to be traced frame by frame. So Canemaker ended his presentation with a short introduction to McCay’s first cel animation The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) which was then projected accompanied only by Serge Bromberg’s sensitive piano playing to bring out the sheer beauty of the film.

John Canemaker achieved the feat of transporting the audience back to the 1910s and opening their eyes for an unfamiliar experience of familiar movies. No wonder John was brought out “for an unprecedented curtain call at the end of his presentation.”

- Oswald Iten

(Wow -- wouldn't it be great to get Canemaker over here in West Michigan??? McCay Day '09... or the Muskegon Film Festival... or the Kalamazoo Animation Festival... Hmmmmm...)

Original Art for Sale

I don't know historically how much original Winsor McCay drawings have been going for, but I recently saw these two pieces of animation art for sale in an auction. Curious to know how much they're worth? The Gertie had a starting bid of $7500 and the Lusitania was $8000. I would have expected Gertie to be the higher of the two, but I bet McCay's signature raises the second one.

Makes you sick when you think of how those drawings were treated in McCay's films. Remember in the "Little Nemo" and "Gertie" movies when, as a gag, hundreds of McCay's drawings get dropped all over the floor and trampled? As I understand it, those weren't props - those really were his actual drawings... They had already been filmed frame by frame of course, and no one saw any need/value in the actual physical drawings anymore.

McCay Day 2008! (Part One)

McCay Day has arrived! All 3 events at the Spring Lake District Library drew big crowds, and everyone had a Great time. Today kicked off with tons of fun for Preschoolers as they were introduced to Winsor McCay's Gertie. Here are Gertie shaped Dino-Buddies and cookies waiting for the kids to arrive:


And someone was going to win this GIANT layered Gertie Cookie!


Let the Buddy stuffing begin!



Decorating those cookies...


Happy buddies with their Buddies...


Winners of the GIANT cookie:


Then it was time to decorate that super 10 foot Gertie...


Here's the finished product!


Thanks to the library for all the great work that went into this -- and thanks to you Spring Lake for coming!

Great Gertie!

Stop by the Spring Lake District Library with your kids on McCay Day, June 17, and help us decorate and color this giant 10 foot tall Gertie!

Gertie on Ice

Here's a great tribute to Winsor McCay, and it's within the walls of Disney World. "Dinosaur Gertie's Ice Cream of Extinction" is Disney's way of paying tribute to McCay's masterpiece of animation that paved the way for Mickey to come along a decade and a half later. Love the life-size Gertie!

Brian Fies

Eisner Award winning comic artist Brian Fies has written more than once about his admiration for Winsor McCay. And his love shows through when he describes purchasing one of the original Gertie drawings. What a treasure! He writes about it here, here, and here.

Buster Keaton

I had no idea there were also local Buster Keaton ties! Apparently he called Muskegon home. After our last McCay meeting I had the pleasure of talking with Ron, a Buster Keaton fan, who maintains the Actor's Colony site and helps organize the annual Buster Keaton festival in Muskegon. How could I not know there was an annual Buster Keaton festival in Muskegon? I am so there next year.

Ron was intrigued by the local McCay meeting because of a major Keaton/McCay tie. In Buster's first film "The Three Ages" he parodies Winsor's work. Buster makes his grand debut film entrance by riding in on a dinosaur, mirroring the way McCay exited his film masterpiece - riding out on Gertie the dinosaur:




Here's a quote from "Before Mickey: The Animated Film" by Donald Crafton:

"Even Buster Keaton paid homage to McCay, in his 1923 film The Three Ages. He asked his writer, Clyde Bruckman, 'Remember Gertie the Dinosaur? . . . The first cartoon comedy ever made. I saw it in a nickelodeon when I was fourteen. I'll ride in on an animated cartoon.' "

You can watch The Three Ages here, and you can watch Gertie four posts below...

Animation History

Any time animation history is discussed, Winsor McCay will always be mentioned. And although it wasn't his first film, it's "Gertie the Dinosaur" that will be noted. This is due to the fact that for the first time audiences were seeing a real animated character, a real personality. Winsor McCay realized you could use film to do something New -- you could go beyond simple animated gimmicks that had already been seen in flipbooks for years -- you could use film to tell stories, to bring characters to life.

When talking about the chronology of animation history, the two names that get mentioned before McCay are J Stewart Blackton and Emile Cohl. I thought I would provide movies from all three filmakers here in one spot so you can see the progression -- and the HUGE leap between McCay's accomplishment and the few experiments that proceeded him.

First up is Blackton. He was an American artist and, like McCay, created his first film as a variation on his vaudeville speed-drawing act. "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" was created in 1906 and is considered to be the first animated film. That is, it's on film and the pictures move. This was accomplished by drawing pictures on a blackboard, shooting a frame of film, then erasing and redrawing parts of the picture:



The next name that gets mentioned is Emile Cohl. This French artist created "Fantasmagorie" in 1908. This is considered to be the first example of "traditional hand drawn animation" because it was drawn on successive sheets of paper. It was shot on negative film however to make it look like white line on blackboard:



Then comes Winsor McCay. After now having seen what came before him, I hope appreciation for what McCay accomplished is greatly magnified. His first film was in 1911, but I'm going to show Gertie (1914) because, again, this is the film that gets mentioned in animation history because it's the first character driven personality to appear in animation. Again, think of what came before, now look at what Winsor did:



I marvel at how detailed and fluid the movement is. In terms of animation, this is more beautiful than a lot of cartoons being produced today! Gertie looks so dimensional, she has such a sense of weight - she looks real. In fact, the reason McCay chose a dinosaur was to prove he wasn't somehow just tracing live action. Notice how all those animation techniques taught today -- slow ins and outs, use of arcs, secondary actions, etc -- those principles are all there! Before those techniques were ever articulated, McCay intuitively worked all that in. Also keep in mind that this was before cels. When animation later advanced, backgrounds were painted on a separate surface, and all the frames of animation were created on transparent cels so the background could show through from beneath. But McCay is inventing all this from scratch, and no one has ever considered cels yet. That complicated background had to be redrawn by hand on every single frame --- drawn over and over thousand and thousands of times! "Gertie the Dinosaur" is a marvelous feat.

I think it depends on what your definition of animation is. If animation is simply "making something move," Blackton and Cohl did that. But if animation is "bringing something to life," McCay is first in my book.