Gertie the Dinosaur

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Movie
German title Gertie the Dinosaur
Original title Gertie the Dinosaur
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1914
length 12 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Winsor McCay
script Winsor McCay
production Winsor McCay
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Gertie on Tour

Gertie the Dinosaur [ ˌgəːtiː də ˌdʌɪnəsɔː ], also known as Gertie the Trained Dinosaur , is an American short film of the cartoonists and comic artist Winsor McCay from the year 1914 . The main part of the film consists of sequences hand-drawn by McCay in which he presents the dinosaur lady Gertie and has some tricks performed.

Originally this cartoon was created for McCay's stage appearances; A framework story was subsequently filmed for theatrical productions in which his work on the creation of the cartoon was shown. Gertie the Dinosaur is one of the most famous and most innovative animated films in early film history, Gertie himself is seen by many film historians as the first real cartoon character who brought the new genre of animated films the commercial and artistic breakthrough.

action

McCay with Gertie at the dinner party
Gertie wears Winsor McCay

The actual cartoon is embedded in a slapstick-style framework. The cartoonists Winsor McCay and George McManus are on a trip with friends when the car has a flat tire. Until the driver has mended the tire, the gentlemen's company visits the natural history museum , in front of which the car has come to a halt. Here the friends marvel at a huge brontosaur skeleton . McCay bets McManus over dinner that he can bring the dinosaur to life with a series of hand-drawn cartoons. In six months of work, McCay draws more than ten thousand individual pictures, which are then photographed by a film camera . He shows George McManus the progress of his work, with an assistant accidentally dropping hundreds of sheets of paper.

When the cartoon is finished, McCay presents the film to his friends over dinner. McCay first draws the outline of the dinosaur that bears the name Gertie . Then he shows a picture of a landscape with a lake, a large tree and rocks in the background, in which he now wants to show Gertie as a living being.

The animated sequences begin in which Gertie initially emerges somewhat shyly from a cave and then approaches the foreground of the picture. She swallows a large stone and then eats a tree. McCay approaches Gertie and asks her to greet the audience. She then performs tricks, alternately lifts her front legs and begins to dance. In the middle of her performance, she lets herself be distracted by a sea ​​snake , a winged lizard and a mammoth , which she throws into the lake in high spirits. When Gertie is scolded by McCay for her unruly behavior, she begins to cry, but lets herself be soothed by a pumpkin thrown at her. Later Gertie drinks the whole lake thirstily.

Finally, Winsor McCay personally steps onto the screen as a cartoon character. Armed with a large whip, he can be picked up by Gertie as a trainer and set down on her back. McCay rides off on Gertie, and the cartoon ends. McCay's friends are thrilled with the movie, and McManus, who lost the bet, has to settle the dinner bill.

Production history

Production of the individual images for Gertie the Dinosaur (film excerpt)

Winsor McCay, who liked to describe himself as "America's greatest cartoonist", was best known for the newspaper comics Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend . In addition, McCay began performing as a quick draftsman on the vaudeville stages as early as 1909 . In 1911, McCay produced a two-minute cartoon in which the characters from Little Nemo appeared. In order to sell the cartoon sequences as one-act plays with the usual length of around ten minutes in the cinema, a real framework was added in which, among other things, the laborious work involved in creating the animation sequences was presented in a comedic manner.

The film pioneer James Stuart Blackton , who five years earlier had created one of the first animated films with Humorous Phases of Funny Faces , assisted McCay in creating the film. Although the French Émile Cohl had further developed the art of stop-trick shots with his abstract animated films , Little Nemo was one of the first films with typical comic characters. In 1912 McCay produced a second cartoon, How a Mosquite Operates , which already contained a short plot. Both films were used by McCay in his stage programs.

For his next project, McCay and Gertie chose a topic that could not be implemented using conventional cinematic means. McCay had made drawings of prehistoric animals for the American Historical Association in 1912 , and by 1905 a brontosaur skeleton had appeared in a Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend comic. But never before had dinosaurs been seen in a film. McCay also decided to let his new cartoon character appear against a realistic background. This required far more elaborate drawings than in his two previous films. While McCay made 4,000 drawings for Little Nemo , the almost four-minute animation of Gertie the Dinosaur, according to McCay's own statements , required more than 10,000 drawings, which took him more than a year to make (in the film, a production time of six months spoken).

McCay hired a boy from the neighborhood, John A. Fitzsimmons, as an assistant. Fitzsimmons' job was to copy the background drawings, which did not change in the individual scenes. Since the cel animation , in which transparent foils were painted, had not yet been invented, all details had to be drawn on rice paper for each individual image . The division of labor introduced by McCay, in which the background image was drawn in beforehand, caught on only a short time later in the cartoon industry when John Randolph Bray patented a similar process. Bray's patent turned out to be a plagiarism of McCay's work techniques, which Bray had studied intensively on false pretenses.

Another innovation in the animation process that McCay introduced at Gertie the Dinosaur was the division of the animation into individual phases that corresponded to only a pose or a short sequence of movements. Because the initial situation and the end of the phase were drawn first, the sections in between could be drawn more quickly and more precisely. McCay succeeded not only in simplifying the animation, but also in a more realistic movement of the characters, which was reinforced in rhythmic sequences such as Gertie's dance movements through the repeated use of identical drawings. This type of division of the animation process was later further developed in Disney Studios , when special artists, the so-called inbetweeners , were responsible for the design of the intermediate phases .

By early 1914, all drawings were completed and ready to be transferred to film. The individual images were photographed in Blackton's Vitagraph studio.

Performance history

Movie poster for Gertie the Dinosaur

Winsor McCay presented his new animated film for the first time on February 8, 1914 in the Palace Theater in Chicago as part of his stage program. McCay stood in front of the screen and interacted with the cartoon character. The illusion on stage was perfect when McCay apparently tossed Gertie an apple (in the later film it was a pumpkin, so the proportions between Gertie and the fruit in the film matched better) and when he animated at the end of the strip in sync with his appearance Character stepped behind the screen in the film.

The audience was particularly impressed by the way McCay presented Gertie. Émile Cohl, who worked in New York until March 1914 , later described the impression that McCay's appearance in New York's Hammerstein Theater had made on him. In his opinion, the audience was just as enthusiastic about the artist McCay as they were about the work of art, the film presented. Cohl observed that McCay's appearances were extremely lucrative.

The success of McCay's stage program, which led to extensive travels through the eastern United States, angered publisher William Randolph Hearst , for whose newspapers McCay worked exclusively. While the performances had initially given Hearst's Sunday papers valuable popularity, the publisher later insisted that McCay concentrate on his newspaper comics and imposed a general ban on his employed comic artists from appearing on vaudeville stages. As a result, other planned appearances in the United Booking Office's schedule were canceled. Only a well-developed compromise helped McCay to further appearances in Vaudeville until 1917, but these were limited to the New York stages, which meant the end of his stage career.

In autumn 1914, the film producer contacted William Fox McCay and suggested that he film Gertie the Dinosaur in rental to drive. Fox had recognized the economic potential of the film, which had grossed $ 350 within a week in a New York movie theater alone. National marketing of Gertie the Dinosaur was announced on November 14, 1914.

For the presentation of the cartoon in the cinema, McCay filmed a real framework and replaced the content of the stage program, his dialogues with Gertie, with subtitles . The frame story largely corresponds to the story McCay had already developed for Little Nemo . It is not known whether these scenes, in which other Hearst cartoonists such as Roy McCardell or Tad Dorgan appeared in addition to George McManus, were recorded before or after Hearst's intervention. However, Gertie the Dinosaur was registered for US copyright on September 15, 1914.

reception

Contemporary reception

Newspaper ad for Gertie the Dinosaur

Even if - unlike in many more recent publications - Gertie the Dinosaur was not the first cartoon in film history, it was only the success of this film that pushed the development of the still young genre. Many later animators were inspired by Gertie, among them pioneers such as Ub Iwerks , Paul Terry or Max and Dave Fleischer . The pioneer of modern stop-motion technology, Willis O'Brien , was also influenced by McCay's film in his first animated film The Dinosaur and the Missing Link , which was made just a year after Gertie the Dinosaur . Also in 1915, an unauthorized remake of Gertie the Dinosaur was released, believed to have been made in the studios of John Randolph Bray, who, despite the poor quality, managed to share in the success of Winsor McCay's film. A cinematic homage, on the other hand, was a scene animated by Max Fleischer in the 1923 comedy Three Ages , in which director and leading actor Buster Keaton climbs on the head of a dinosaur.

Winsor McCay himself saw the greatest success of Gertie in the fact that animation was accepted as a new art form. Little Nemo and How a Mosquito Operates looked more like stage tricks to the audience, comparable to the visual effects in Georges Méliès ' films. “It wasn't until I drew 'Gertie the Dinosaur' that the audience understood that I was making animated pictures.” Otto Messmer , creator of Felix the Cat , confirmed McCay's assessment in 1976 and remembered the impression that Gertie the Dinosaur had made on the audience : "It was a huge success to see a drawing in motion."

aftermath

Excerpt from Gertie on Tour

Despite the great popularity of Gertie the Dinosaur , McCay concentrated in the following years on his work as a newspaper cartoonist and comic strip artist. It wasn't until four years later that McCay published his next cartoon, a realistic propaganda film about the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German submarine during the First World War . In 1921, McCay finally produced a series of cartoons based on his Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend comic series . That same year, McCay worked on a sequel to Gertie the Dinosaur . In Gertie on Tour , Gertie should visit famous landmarks like New York's Brooklyn Bridge or the Washington Monument in Washington, DC . The film was never completed, however, and only fragments of Gertie on Tour remained.

A widely acclaimed revival of Gertie the Dinosaur came in 1927 at a banquet held in New York in honor of McCay. Even after his death in 1934, Winsor McCay's films were not forgotten, for example Gertie the Dinosaur was shown in a retrospective at the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art in 1940 . In 1955, Gertie finally premiered on American television when Winsor McCay's 1914 stage program was re-enacted for an episode of Walt Disney's television program Disneyland about the story of the animated drawing (The Story of the Animated Drawing) .

The original Gertie the Dinosaur negatives were thought to be lost for many years. Winsor McCay's son had left parts of his father's estate, including several film cans and around 400 original drawings by Gertie the Dinosaur , to the collector Irving Mendelsohn, who initially ignored the film roles. It was not until 1947 that they were identified as the original negatives of McCay's films and copied onto security film . The negatives were given to the Canadian Cinémathèque Québécoise in the 1960s , which published a first restored version of Gertie the Dinosaur in 1967 . In 2004, the Film Institute, in cooperation with Milestone Film & Video, released a newly restored version of McCay's short films on DVD .

Film historical evaluation

While Winsor McCay was only considered one of the most influential comic artists in the United States in the first decades after his death, his role in the development of animated film has been increasingly emphasized since the 1960s. Since filmmaker and film historian John Canemaker released the documentary Remembering Winsor McCay in 1976 , interest in McCay's films has increased.

Gertie the Dinosaur is by far the most important film by Winsor McCay. Donald Crafton calls it the most progressive animated film of its time, which has rightly been called a masterpiece and made a significant contribution to the development of the cartoon genre. But it also shows the typical endeavor of the pioneers of animated film to portray and perpetuate themselves in their films. This type of self-reflection makes Gertie the Dinosaur a forerunner of postmodern art, according to film historian Jason Mittell .

For the English film historian Paul Ward, Gertie the Dinosaur marked a turning point in the perception of animated films. The early animated films by artists such as Blackton or Méliès, which were solely aimed at the surprise effect, were part of the standard repertoire of film programs, but their attractiveness had waned by the early 1910s. Gertie the Dinosaur was something new as a narrative animated film at the time. The film was advertised not only as a show act in which Winsor McCay appears to be showing a living dinosaur. Rather, McCay's achievement as an animator of this cinematic innovation was emphasized. This was a first step towards establishing cartoons as supporting films in the film program.

The artistic and economic success of Gertie the Dinosaur was so significant in this development that Leonard Maltin sees the origin of the American animation industry in the film. On the other hand, however, film historians such as Michael Barrier emphasize that McCay's method of working with production times of several months did not enable the series production of films. The animated film industry, which had developed successful series with Mutt and Jeff , Felix the Cat and Koko the Clown , among others, at the end of the 1910s , could only survive with significantly reduced animation art and automated techniques such as the cel animation introduced by John Randolph Bray. According to Jerry Beck McCays, the initial spark for this development came from Gertie the Dinosaur .

Although Winsor McCay only released a single film with his character, Gertie is considered to be the first animated movie star. The film critic David Kehr compared Gertie's fame with later cartoon characters like Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny , who, like Gertie, had their own personality. Even if John Canemaker had already recognized the characteristics of an anthropomorphic figure in the mosquito of How a Mosquite Operates , according to Paul Wells it was only in Gertie the Dinosaur that a cartoon character was created that could express feelings and with which the audience felt connected. The emotional range of character animation that McCay had hinted at with Gertie was not perfected until the 1930s by Walt Disney, who was heavily influenced by McCay.

Even among today's animators and animators , Gertie the Dinosaur is considered a particularly influential film. In a survey by Jerry Beck of more than 1000 animation artists , Gertie the Dinosaur was voted 6th of the 50 best cartoons. It was the only silent film in the list of the best, along with Felix in Hollywood from 1923, which was placed 50th .

Awards

Gertie the Dinosaur was included in the National Film Registry in 1991 as the first short film and, after the Disney feature-length films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia, as the third animated film and is therefore considered a particularly well-preserved American film. At the time, it was the oldest film to be listed in the National Film Registry .

literature

  • Alexander Braun: Winsor McCay (1869–1934): Comics, Films, Dreams. Bocola, Bonn 2012, ISBN 978-3-939625-40-7 .
  • John Canemaker: Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. Harry N. Abrams, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8109-5941-0 .
  • Donald Crafton: Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928. MIT Press; Cambridge (Mass.) 1982, ISBN 0-262-03083-7 .
  • Leonard Maltin : Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Plume Books, New York 1980, ISBN 0-452-25993-2 .

Web links

Commons : Gertie the Dinosaur  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Some authors mention 1909 as the year of publication. McCay himself stated in a publication from 1919 the year of publication 1914, cf. Karl F. Cohen: Winsor McCay's Animation Lesson Number One, 1919 ( March 25, 2005 memento on the Internet Archive ) in Animation World Magazine , October 28, 2002 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  2. ^ A b Leonard Maltin: Of Mice and Magic , p. 5.
  3. ↑ James Clark: Animated Films . Virgin Books, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-7535-1258-6 , p. 12.
  4. ↑ Donald Crafton: Before Mickey , p. 123.
  5. ^ Bernhard Kempen and Thomas Deist: Das Dinosaurier Filmbuch. From “Gertie the Dinosaur” to “Jurassic Park” . Thomas Tilsner Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-910079-54-7 .
  6. ^ Time : McCay Before Disney , January 10, 1938 (accessed August 27, 2008); The budget of US $ 50,000 given by Time is, however, unrealistically high, for example the 1915 monumental film The Birth of a Nation cost US $ 112,000.
  7. ↑ a b Michael Barrier: Hollywood Cartoons. American Animation in its Golden Age . Oxford University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 978-0-19-516729-0 , p. 12.
  8. ↑ Lauren Rabinovitz: Gertie the Dinosaur . In: International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers , Vol. 1, St. James Press, Farmington Hills 2000, ISBN 1-55862-450-3 , p. 457.
  9. ^ John Canemaker: Winsor McCay: His Life and Art , p. 176
  10. ↑ quoted from Étienne Arnaud and Boisyvon: Le Cinéma pour tous . Garnier, Paris 1922, pp. 82-83.
  11. ↑ cf. Mark Langer: Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (2004) . In: The Moving Image 5.1 (2005), pp. 149-153.
  12. ^ Advertisement in Moving Picture World , November 14, 1914.
  13. ↑ Donald Crafton: Before Mickey , p. 112.
  14. ↑ John Kenworthy: The Hand Behind the Mouse: An Intimate Biography of Ub Iwerks . Disney Editions, New York 2001, ISBN 0-7868-5320-4 , p. 9.
  15. ^ Leonard Maltin: Of Mice and Magic , p. 127.
  16. ↑ Jeff lenburg: Who's Who in Animated Cartoons . Applause Theater & Cinema Books, New York 2006, ISBN 1-55783-671-X , p. 88.
  17. ^ Donald Crafton: Before Mickey , p. 263.
  18. ^ Donald Crafton: Before Mickey , p. 260.
  19. ↑ Eleanor Keaton and Jeffrey Vance: Buster Keaton Remembered . Harry N. Abrams, New York 2001, ISBN 0-8109-4227-5 , p. 114.
  20. ↑ quoted from Leonard Maltin: Of Mice and Magic , p. 4.
  21. ^ "It was quite a hit to see a drawing move". Quoted in Jennifer Dunning: The Real Star of Felix the Cat . In: The New York Times , May 16, 1976 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  22. ^ The New York Times : Winsor McCay Gives Exhibition , July 20, 1927 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  23. ^ Frank S. Nugent: A Backward Glance of Cartoons . In: The New York Times , March 31, 1940 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  24. ^ Charles Solomon: Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1989, ISBN 0-394-54684-9 , p. 18.
  25. ^ Charles Solomon: Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1989, ISBN 0-394-54684-9 , p. 19.
  26. ^ Paul Wells: Understanding Animation . Routledge, New York 2006, ISBN 0-415-11597-3 , p. 15.
  27. ^ Donald Crafton: Tricks and Animation . In: The Oxford History of World Cinema . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996, ISBN 0-19-874242-8 , p. 73.
  28. ↑ Donald Crafton: Before Mickey , p. 11.
  29. ↑ Jason Mittell: Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture . Routledge, New York 2004, ISBN 0-415-96902-6 , p. 179.
  30. ^ Paul Ward: Defining "Animation": The Animated Film and the Emergence of the Film Bill . In: Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies , December 2000, ISSN  1465-9166 .
  31. ↑ Richard Koszarski: An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 . University of California Press, Berkeley 1994, ISBN 0-520-08535-3 , p. 170.
  32. ↑ Jerry Beck: Animation's 10 sharpest turns  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.variety.com   . In: Variety , May 26, 2006 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  33. ↑ David Kehr: When a Cyberstar is Born . In: The New York Times , November 18, 2001 (accessed August 27, 2008).
  34. ^ John Canemaker: Winsor McCay: His Life and Art , p. 33
  35. ^ Paul Wells: Understanding Animation . Routledge, New York 2006, ISBN 0-415-11597-3 , p. 130.
  36. ^ Jill Nelmes: An Introduction to Film Studies . Routledge, New York 2003, ISBN 0-415-26268-2 , p. 218.
  37. ↑ Jerry Beck (Ed.): The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals . JG Press, North Dighton, 1998, ISBN 1-57215-271-0 .
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 1st, 2008 in this version .