Winsor McCay - Text
Winsor McCay was born on 26 September 1869 and died on 26 July 1934. He is known both for his comic strips, in particular his two large series Little Nemo (for the New York Herald) and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (for the Evening Telegram), and for his pioneering work in animated drawings. McCay became interested in animation in 1909; by his own account, this interest was sparked when his son showed him a flip-book.
His first animated film was an adaptation of Little Nemo (1911), in which he showed himself while at work, enabling viewers, for the first time, to understand both how animated drawings work and the spectacular quantity of labour they required. In 1914, McCay produced another milestone in the history of the medium, Gertie the Dinosaur, for which he recruited an assistant (John Fitzsimmons), thereby foreshadowing how the cartoon industry of the future would function. McCay was also behind the system he called the “McCay split-system,” which consisted in dividing the action into several phases so that he could plan its rhythm by filling in at a later time the images between the movement’s key moments.
McCay, however, was not a part of the shift to industrialization which occurred in the 1910s. For the most part he made his films for alternative distribution circuits; Gertie the Dinosaur was conceived first and foremost as a stage show in which he would interact with the dinosaur he created by means of orders planned in advance. The film was exhibited in movie theatres under pressure from William Randolph Hearst, for whom McCay worked from 1911. His relations with the cartoon industry were fairly contentious; on several occasions John Randolph Bray tried to accuse him of the illegal use of techniques which he had begun to patent in 1914. This situation prompts us to think about the legitimacy of conceiving of animated drawings as a mere technique which can be patented.
Bibliography
- Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005 [1987].
- Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982.
