Premiering almost three years to the month of the German submarine attack on a passenger ship, Winsor McCay's laborious effort to bring a dramatic slant to one of the United States' momentus events during the second year of the Great War resulted in the groundbreaking animated cartoon May 1918's "The Sinking of the Lusitania." The 12-minute film was not only the longest animation up to that time, but is the earliest surviving cartoon of a serious and dramatic nature.
McCay, an editorial cartoonist for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain, was a animated hobbyist in his spare time. He was bothered by Hearst's demands that he draw only anti-war, anti-British cartoons since the publisher was an ardent isolationist ever since the war began in 1914. The German submarine attack on the British ocean liner Lusitania carrying American passengers on May 7, 1915, especially rankled McCay, sparking a project of illustrating the sinking in animated form.
For 22 months, he along with two other illustrators composed over 25,000 drawings in their spare time and using McCay's own money. The trio used the fairly new animated technology of cel animation, using sheets of cellulose acetate to draw the movements of the ship and sub while retaining the static layer underneath, the first time McCay had ever used the process. Despite the time-saving operation, the moving cartoon still took an inordinate amount of time to create. To produce eight seconds of film, McCay claimed it took eight weeks to draw and film.
Jewel Productions, a film distribution company, paid the highest price at that time for a one-reeler for its rights. The company claimed the cartoon was "the world's only record of the crime that shocked humanity" since there weren't any cameras on board the Lusitania to record the torpedo hits. The propaganda value when it was shown during the summer of 1918, although emotional, was limited since American troops were already heavily involved in the European battles. But the "Lusitania" would serve as an example to the effectiveness in using animation for propaganda purposes, especially when World War Two rolled around 25 years later.
