Gertie the Dinosaur

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Ilene S. Goldman

Billed as "The Greatest Animal Act in the World," the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur premiered in Chicago in February 1914. "She eats, drinks, and breathes! She laughs and cries! Dances the tango, answers questions and obeys every command! Yet, she lived millions of years before man inhabited this earth and has never been seen since!!" claimed the posters. Though Gertie was not the first cartoon character to come alive on screen, she might as well have been. As American film critic Leonard Maltin has written, "One might say that Gertie launched an entire industry." Created by the American comic strip artist Winsor McCay, Gertie's silent debut preceded Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse sound film, Steamboat Willie, by 14 years. Though animated cartoons date to experiments in Thomas A. Edison's film studio as early as 1906, it was McCay's sophisticated drawings, charming story, and ingenuity that first really gave "life" to animated characters. It was Gertie's charming personality that captured the imagination of filmgoers.

Popular comic strips were made to move early in the history of cinema, but the development of the art and craft of animation was initially inhibited by economic constraints. While audiences and exhibitors expected animated cartoons to be produced with the same frequency as newspaper comic strips, one minute of an animated cartoon required about 1000 drawings (each film frame was one drawing, and passed at the speed of 16 frames per second). The speed of production precluded much analysis of the art, and early animators had to depend on visual gags and dialogue balloons to get a laugh.

McCay, a well-known newspaper cartoonist, inspired by his son's flip-up books and the pioneering films of J. Stuart Blackton, began experimenting with cartoons and motion pictures in 1907. Four years later, in April, 1911, he premiered his first animated cartoon, Little Nemo, based on one of his popular comic strip characters. This short film had no story. Instead, the character asked the audience, in a dialogue balloon, to watch him move as he jumped, flipped, ran, and bounced. To create this short film, McCay hand-colored four thousand frames of 35mm film. He incorporated Little Nemo into his vaudeville act and the audience loved it.

Next, McCay created The Story of a Mosquito, which took him about a year to make. This new cartoon advanced the techniques used for Little Nemo, this time telling a story--of a mosquito's experience with a drunken man. Although McCay's second film, which also premiered as part of his vaudeville act, was well-received, audiences and critics had a hard time accepting that drawings could be brought to life on film, and suspected that the movement was some sort of trick produced with wires and figures.

Gertie the Dinosaur was McCay's answer to the sceptics. He chose a dinosaur as his character because the animal was long extinct and no one could claim that the artist was employing trickery to make her move. The idea of a dinosaur as the subject of an animated drawing was far-fetched. McCay's ingenuity, however, lay in the manner in which he presented the one-reel film in his vaudeville act. As Leonard Maltin describes it, McCay performed on-stage with the cartoon, playing Gertie's trainer and interacting with the motion picture. Gertie "obeyed" his commands, cried when he reprimanded her, ate the snacks he tossed her, and playfully teased her trainer. At the end of the film, McCay walked onto the screen, becoming part of the animation, and together he and Gertie walked away.

Gertie the Dinosaur was a one-reel film, lasting about 12 minutes. To create his memorable character, McCay inked 10,000 drawings on rice paper and then mounted them on cardboard. He invented a flip machine to check the animation. Most astonishing, perhaps, for current aficionados accustomed to animation cells and computer-generated animation, McCay had to redraw the dinosaur and her background for every frame. He drew over 10,000 Gerties himself, and enlisted John A. Fitzsimmons to reproduce the backgrounds, often by tracing.

The film and its "leading lady" were wildly popular and the dinosaur became an instant star. McCay, however, had little desire to remain involved in the industry that his work had spawned. He preferred, instead, to continue with his newspaper comic strips and vaudeville acts, and to work on his films for his own satisfaction. In further developing the art of animation, McCay created, among others, The Centaurs and The Sinking of the Lusitania. In these, as in Gertie, his graphic precision was far more sophisticated than that of his contemporary animators. Eventually, McCay stopped making films altogether, although early animators, including John Randolph Bray, the inventor of the cell, considered McCay to be the father of their art and their craft. Indeed, McCay himself is reported to have proudly christened himself "the creator of animated cartoons."