The History of Gertie

On February 22, 1914, Winsor McCay presented an animated masterpiece to the public during his vaudeville act in Chicago.  In this dramatic premier the animator interacted with an on-screen dinosaur, Gertie, projected behind him on the stage.  A theater version that traveled without McCay was released later that year by the Box Office Attractions Co. with live action film sequences and captions.  Gertie was not the first animated motion picture, nor was McCay the first animator.  However, McCay and Gertie were the first to demonstrate the enormous potential of the medium, and together they inspired an entire generation of animators.  Not until the collaborative projects of Disney Studios in the 1930s was McCay's artistry rivaled in such films as Snow White.

Winsor McCay was born circa 1869 in Canada and came to be regarded as one of the great comic illustrators of his time.  Upon seeing an animated "flip book" of one of his children, he was inspired to turn his best known comic strip (Little Nemo in Slumberland) into an animated motion picture.  This first of his animated films was released in 1911 as Winsor McCay and his Moving Comics.  He produced another lesser known short entitled How a Mosquito Operates in 1912.  Amid accusations that he had used trick photography to produce drawings and movements that were too realistic, he chose for his next film a subject that could not be copied from life -- a dinosaur.  Gertie was the crowning achievement in his career as an animator, incorporating naturalistic movements of objects, animals and even an animated self-caricature.  A background was faithfully reproduced by an apprentice (John Fitzsimmons) on every frame, and the cartoon had a masterful and polished appeal.  Several subsequent films were produced and released by McCay and his son Robert.  Advances in animation led McCay to incorporate cels and backgrounds into later works, giving those films an entirely different feel.

Unfortunately, the explosion of commercial animation silenced the aesthetic but uneconomical genius of Winsor McCay, and his films were nearly lost.  Despite great international commercial success in the 1910s, Gertie later seemed to all but disappear from memory around the world.  After his death in 1934, copies of McCay's films surfaced from time to time in film festivals and documentaries, showing McCay to have been far ahead of his time.  The prints were generally of poor quality, while the few extant original nitrate prints deteriorated in storage.  La Cinémathèque québécoise took the critical step of properly preserving their nitrate prints of McCay's films, and in 1967 la Cinémathèque had them copied onto 35mm safety film.  In 1974, Prof. John Canemaker of NYU produced a short documentary entitled Remembering Winsor McCay.   This project reintroduced McCay to the world as the pioneer that he was, a man ahead of his time.  In the late 1980s, copies of the films were released by Lumivision on laserdisc, VHS and DVD as Animation Legend: Winsor McCay.   At the same time, Canemaker released his authoritative book on the artist, entitled Winsor McCay: His Life and Art.  A new video including a partially restored version of Gertie is to be included in Milestone Films' Winsor McCay: the Master Edition in 2004.

Please see our Links page for more information about Gertie and Winsor McCay.

       

Additional Pages:
What is the Gertie Project?
Contributors to the Gertie Project
The Structure of Gertie
A Gertie Gallery
The Steps to Restoration
A Restored Clip from Gertie
Gertie Links
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