Quote:

Quote from legendary Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones:

"The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney. I'm not sure who should go first."

Maurice Sendak's homage

Children's author Maurice Sendak pens the forward to John Canemaker's biography on Winsor McCay. In it he says:

"My book In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to Winsor McCay."

I always thought this was figurative -- as in, "the spirit of McCay." But after taking a closer look, there are also super strong Visual parallels between "In the Night Kitchen" and "Little Nemo in Slumberland."

The most obvious similarity is Kitchen's opening image. Sendak starts his book the same way McCay ends every Nemo comic:



Nemo does lots of falling:



Spends some time nekid:




This one is probably a stretch:



And look what I found hiding in the Night Kitchen! Clever, clever me with peekings and seekings!

It's disguised well -- it actually says "Chicken Little, Nemo Mass..." Nicely hidden!

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...

Great Quote

Not only did McCay come out of the character animation gate first, but he also did so with sheer technical brilliance. You would expect the first character animation to be clunky and crude and take time to work it's way up to what we know today. But no -- McCay's work still stands superior to much of what is produced today. Here's a quote from Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes) that says it better than I could:

"It is as thought the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay's animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to find out how he did it."

found in a comment posted at Cartoon Brew

Muskegon Chronicle article

The Muskegon Chronicle picked up on the news about the attempt to honor McCay here in Spring Lake. They even tapped McCay biographer John Canemaker. Here are some excerpts from a nice long article:

"This is not like having some aviator from Spring Lake. This is like having someone who invented manned flight," [Aaron] Zenz said. "Winsor McCay isn't just some animator. He's the guy who invented animation as we know it."

"What struck me is there was nothing in this town to commemorate him," [Kevin] Collier recalled. "It was pretty clear to me there was nothing. The district library had one book on him. For the most part, Spring Lake had no idea the guy existed."

"One of the things that really surprised us about him is he is so preeminent in his field that you can go to practically any illustrator any place in the world, and ask 'Who is Winsor McCay?' and he will be able to tell you," [Chris Davis] said. "But you walk down the street in Spring Lake and nobody will be able to tell you."

"We can truly say he was the first artist who started a type of animation that Disney would do later -- personality animation where they want you to believe the characters they have created are real. Disney did not try that until 20 years after Winsor McCay." [John] Canemaker said

"I'm glad people are trying to push this forward [a Spring Lake tribute to McCay]," said Canemaker.

Read the whole article here: Spring Lake man influenced Disney, Walter Lantz

The Arrival

I fell head over heels in love with illustration when I first laid eyes on the picture book "The Cinder-eyed Cats" in 1997. Looking at that cover -- those tigers staring back at me -- it touched something deeply intrinsic to who I am and drove me to be an illustrator.

I've not had that degree of inspirational excitement since then.

Until now.

"The Arrival" by Shaun Tan just came out, and flipping through it I was struck again with that same awe and inspiration. It is a story of Immigration, told through powerful images. The setting is a fantastical landscape, so the effect is that we journey with the immigrant, seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels, confused as we also see the odd arrangement of foods and buildings and modes of transportation for the very first time.

The illustrations are gorgeous -- mind-blowing in their detail and scope. The work is, in a word, "Epic." One of the most amazing books I've ever seen.

So why mention it here on this blog? Two reasons -- first, to plug the book! It's super!

And second -- there is a Winsor McCay tie. On the back cover in the midst of the praise quotes, Jeff Smith author of Bone says,

"Wordless, but with perfect narative flow, Tan gives us a story filled with city-scapes worthy of Winsor McCay."

So how far back do you have to go to find a comparison worthy of the decade's most wonderful book? Yep - you stop at Winsor McCay...

Bad Luck!

A quote from Winsor McCay:

"Animation should be an art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art but a trade. Bad Luck!"

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