Review of Gertie the Dinosaur

Winsor McCay combined his filmmaking and performance practices by incorporating his film Gertie The Dinosaur into his stage act. His extraordinary draughtsmanship, based on the working process of drawing two 'extreme' poses for his characters and 'in-betweening' the movement from one to the other, rather than drawing in the 'direct' fashion of moving from one image to the next, revolutionized animation: he was effectively working less with the graphic codes encouraged by the unpredictability of immediate visual improvisation and more with 'realist' conventions of preconceived action. McCay sought to bring plausibility to his 'fantastic' forms so that they would transcend their status as animation. This approach suited the American Historical Society, which had approached McCay in 1912 to consider a 'dinosaur' film. The film opened on 8 February 1914 at the Palace Theater, Chicago, and amazed audiences, who could not work out how the illusion had been achieved. This was partly because Gertie The Dinosaur was the first example of an 'interactive' cartoon, where McCay appeared to be giving instructions to Gertie. McCay's fluid illustration is enhanced by the attention he gave to the ways in which Gertie's size and weight would affect the environment, and the way he informed the rhythm and timing of her movements with 'thought' processes and emotive actions. Gertie's legacy is profound. From Willis O'Brien's The Lost World (1925) to Disney's Dinosaur (2000), pre-history has been reanimated. More importantly, the caricatural conviction in Gertie's personality informs character animation into the contemporary era. Nor more appropriate tribute came than Dick Huemer's re-enactment of McCay's vaudeville act in the television series Disneyland in an episode called 'The Art Of The Animated Drawing' (1955). McCay once presciently suggested that 'artists working hand in hand with science will evolve a new school of art that will revolutionize the whole field'. Warner Brothers' master animator, Chuck Jones, once remarked that 'the two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first'.