Gertie the Dinosaur
Encyclopedia
Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Winsor McCay
. Although not the first feature-length animated film
, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton
and Cohl
, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney
. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe
animation.
The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
, and was named #6 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons
of all time in a 1994 survey of animators and cartoon historians by Jerry Beck
.
performances. McCay started performing "chalk talks" on vaudeville in 1906, as a sideline to his regular newspaper cartooning. In 1911, he began presenting animated films on stage, first an animation of Little Nemo in Slumberland, then How a Mosquito Operates
. Plans for Gertie were announced in 1912. The episode of McCay's newspaper comic In the Land of Wonderful Dreams published in newspapers on the 21st of September 1913 showed the reader some of the creatures from the upcoming film: a "dinosaurus", a sea serpent and a four-winged lizard. In January 1914, the drawings were photographed by Vitagraph Studios
. The first presentation of the film was at the Palace Theater in Chicago
on February 8, 1914; later performances were at the Hammerstein Theater in New York City
.
The performance consisted of McCay interacting with Gertie, a cartoon dinosaur
based on the Brontosaurus skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History
. McCay would stand on stage in front of a projection screen, dressed in a tuxedo and wielding a whip. He would call Gertie, who appeared from behind some rocks. He then instructed her to perform various tricks, similar to a circus act. He would appear to toss a prop apple to her — McCay palmed the apple while Gertie caught an animated copy of it. Gertie was also seen to swallow a large rock, play with a Mastodon
, and drink an entire lake dry. At one point, McCay would scold Gertie for misbehaving, at which she would begin to cry. For the finale, McCay disappeared behind the screen just as a cartoon version of him climbed onto Gertie's head and rode off.
, was displeased with McCay's success outside of the newspapers, and used his contractual power to reduce McCay's stage activities. In late 1914, William Fox
offered to market Gertie the Dinosaur to moving-picture theaters. McCay accepted, and extended the film to include a live-action prologue and intertitle
s to replace his stage patter. This is the version of the film generally seen today; the original animation comprises roughly 5 minutes of the entire 12-minute film.
The film features McCay with several of his cartoonist friends, such as George McManus
(creator of Bringing Up Father
), Roy McCardell
, and Thomas A. Dorgan
. As the film opens, they are "on a joy ride", when their automobile suffers a flat tire in front of a museum. The cartoonists enter the museum, and see a "Dinosaurus" skeleton. McCay bets McManus a dinner that he can "make the Dinosaurus live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons". He then spends six months making "ten thousand cartoons"; when McManus visits, McCay shows him the drawings, although an assistant trips and scatters a large pile of them over the floor (a gag also used in the Little Nemo film). The scene then shifts to a dinner party with the group of cartoonists. McCay begins by sketching a single drawing of Gertie. Someone complains that "your bet was that you could make it move", following which the film shifts to the original animated Gertie. McCay, through intertitles, tells Gertie to come out and bow, and continues through the same interaction as in the vaudeville show (although the "apple" that McCay throws to her is now referred to as a pumpkin, which was more appropriate for the size of Gertie's mouth). The film concludes with the group telling George (McManus) to pay for the dinner.
Gertie the Dinosaur was produced before the introduction of later time-saving techniques such as cel animation. To create the film, McCay himself drew thousands of frames of Gertie on individual 6.5 x 8.5 inch sheets of rice paper. He hired neighbor and art student John A. Fitzsimmons to draw the backgrounds. Fitzsimmons carefully re-traced the rocks, lake and tree from a master drawing onto each sheet of rice paper.
In creating the film, McCay came up with a number of techniques that would later become standard in the animation industry. He used registration marks to keep the background aligned from frame to frame, so that it did not appear to "swim", as often happened in early cartoons. He avoided some repetitious work by re-using drawings, in what would later be called cycling. He devised what he called the "McCay Split System", the first occurrence of keyframe
animation. Rather than draw each frame in sequence, he would start by drawing Gertie's key poses, and then go back and fill in the frames between. McCay was also very concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine how to animate Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's great weight.
McCay was very open about the techniques that he developed. During production of Gertie, he showed all the details to a visitor who claimed to be writing an article about animation. The visitor turned out to be John Randolph Bray
, who later patented many of McCay's methods and tried to sue him. McCay prevailed, however, and received royalties from Bray for several years thereafter.
and Washington, D.C.
, bouncing on the Brooklyn Bridge
and attempting to eat the Washington Monument
, among other scenes. The film may have been designed for performance on the vaudville stage; it exists today only in fragments and concept sketches.
A plagiarization of Gertie, from roughly 1915, was distributed for many years, incorrectly identified as McCay's film. Donald Crafton suggests that this other Gertie may have been created by Bray Productions
, based on its graphical style.
McCay's son Robert
, along with Disney animator Richard Huemer, recreated the original vaudeville performance for the Disneyland
television program in 1955.
Dinosaur Gertie's is a soft serve ice cream location at Disney's Hollywood Studios
in Walt Disney World, Florida
. The building is an example of Programmatic architecture, meaning it is shaped like Dinosaur Gertie. The shop is located on Echo Lake (across from the Giant Sorcerer Hat).
Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator.A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades...
. Although not the first feature-length animated film
El Apóstol
El Apóstol was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film...
, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton
J. Stuart Blackton
James Stuart Blackton , usually known as J. Stuart Blackton, was an Anglo-American film producer of the Silent Era, the founder of Vitagraph Studios and among the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation...
and Cohl
Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl , born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a French caricaturist of the largely forgotten Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".-Biography:Émile's father Elie was a rubber salesman, and his mother, Emilie...
, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe
Key frame
A key frame in animation and filmmaking is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. They are called "frames" because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film...
animation.
The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...
, and was named #6 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons
The 50 Greatest Cartoons
The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals is a 1994 book by animation historian Jerry Beck, consisting of articles about, and rankings of fifty highly-regarded animated short films made in North America, as well as many other notable cartoons. It generated a significant...
of all time in a 1994 survey of animators and cartoon historians by Jerry Beck
Jerry Beck
Jerry Beck is a well-known animation historian, with ten books and numerous articles to his credit. He is also an animation producer, an industry consultant to Warner Bros., and has been an executive with Nickelodeon and Disney....
.
Vaudeville
Gertie the Dinosaur was originally created to be used in McCay's vaudevilleVaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
performances. McCay started performing "chalk talks" on vaudeville in 1906, as a sideline to his regular newspaper cartooning. In 1911, he began presenting animated films on stage, first an animation of Little Nemo in Slumberland, then How a Mosquito Operates
How a Mosquito Operates
How a Mosquito Operates is a 1912 animated short film, animated by Winsor McCay. An incomplete print of the film survives.A mosquito with a suitcase spots a man walking to his apartment . As the man enters, the mostuito slips through the top window over the door. The man lays down to rest while...
. Plans for Gertie were announced in 1912. The episode of McCay's newspaper comic In the Land of Wonderful Dreams published in newspapers on the 21st of September 1913 showed the reader some of the creatures from the upcoming film: a "dinosaurus", a sea serpent and a four-winged lizard. In January 1914, the drawings were photographed by Vitagraph Studios
Vitagraph Studios
American Vitagraph was a United States movie studio, founded by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York. By 1907 it was the most prolific American film production company, producing many famous silent films. It was bought by Warner Bros...
. The first presentation of the film was at the Palace Theater in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
on February 8, 1914; later performances were at the Hammerstein Theater in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
The performance consisted of McCay interacting with Gertie, a cartoon dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
based on the Brontosaurus skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
. McCay would stand on stage in front of a projection screen, dressed in a tuxedo and wielding a whip. He would call Gertie, who appeared from behind some rocks. He then instructed her to perform various tricks, similar to a circus act. He would appear to toss a prop apple to her — McCay palmed the apple while Gertie caught an animated copy of it. Gertie was also seen to swallow a large rock, play with a Mastodon
Mastodon
Mastodons were large tusked mammal species of the extinct genus Mammut which inhabited Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and Central America from the Oligocene through Pleistocene, 33.9 mya to 11,000 years ago. The American mastodon is the most recent and best known species of the group...
, and drink an entire lake dry. At one point, McCay would scold Gertie for misbehaving, at which she would begin to cry. For the finale, McCay disappeared behind the screen just as a cartoon version of him climbed onto Gertie's head and rode off.
Movie theaters
McCay's employer, William Randolph HearstWilliam Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
, was displeased with McCay's success outside of the newspapers, and used his contractual power to reduce McCay's stage activities. In late 1914, William Fox
William Fox (producer)
William Fox born Fried Vilmos was a pioneering Hungarian American motion picture executive who founded the Fox Film Corporation in 1915 and the Fox West Coast Theatres chain in the 1920s...
offered to market Gertie the Dinosaur to moving-picture theaters. McCay accepted, and extended the film to include a live-action prologue and intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
s to replace his stage patter. This is the version of the film generally seen today; the original animation comprises roughly 5 minutes of the entire 12-minute film.
George McManus
George McManus was an American cartoonist best known as the creator of Irish immigrant Jiggs and his wife Maggie, the central characters in his syndicated comic strip, Bringing Up Father....
(creator of Bringing Up Father
Bringing up Father
Bringing Up Father was an influential American comic strip created by cartoonist George McManus . Distributed by King Features Syndicate, it ran for 87 years, from January 12, 1913 to May 28, 2000....
), Roy McCardell
Roy McCardell
Roy Larcom McCardell was an American journalist, scenarist, humorist and writer.-Early life:Roy McCardell was born in 1870 in Hagerstown, Maryland. His father was the editor of the Hagerstown Mail. When he became the editor of the Evening Times in Cumberland, Maryland, the family moved there. Roy...
, and Thomas A. Dorgan
Thomas A. Dorgan
Thomas Aloysius Dorgan also known as Tad Dorgan, was an American cartoonist who signed his drawings as Tad. He is known for his cartoon panel Indoor Sports and the many words and expressions he added to the language.He was born in San Francisco on April 29, 1877...
. As the film opens, they are "on a joy ride", when their automobile suffers a flat tire in front of a museum. The cartoonists enter the museum, and see a "Dinosaurus" skeleton. McCay bets McManus a dinner that he can "make the Dinosaurus live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons". He then spends six months making "ten thousand cartoons"; when McManus visits, McCay shows him the drawings, although an assistant trips and scatters a large pile of them over the floor (a gag also used in the Little Nemo film). The scene then shifts to a dinner party with the group of cartoonists. McCay begins by sketching a single drawing of Gertie. Someone complains that "your bet was that you could make it move", following which the film shifts to the original animated Gertie. McCay, through intertitles, tells Gertie to come out and bow, and continues through the same interaction as in the vaudeville show (although the "apple" that McCay throws to her is now referred to as a pumpkin, which was more appropriate for the size of Gertie's mouth). The film concludes with the group telling George (McManus) to pay for the dinner.
Production
In creating the film, McCay came up with a number of techniques that would later become standard in the animation industry. He used registration marks to keep the background aligned from frame to frame, so that it did not appear to "swim", as often happened in early cartoons. He avoided some repetitious work by re-using drawings, in what would later be called cycling. He devised what he called the "McCay Split System", the first occurrence of keyframe
Key frame
A key frame in animation and filmmaking is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. They are called "frames" because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film...
animation. Rather than draw each frame in sequence, he would start by drawing Gertie's key poses, and then go back and fill in the frames between. McCay was also very concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine how to animate Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's great weight.
McCay was very open about the techniques that he developed. During production of Gertie, he showed all the details to a visitor who claimed to be writing an article about animation. The visitor turned out to be John Randolph Bray
John Randolph Bray
John Randolph Bray was an American animator. He produced the second animated film in color, The Debut of Thomas Cat , in Brewster Color, developed by Percy D. Brewster of Newark, New Jersey...
, who later patented many of McCay's methods and tried to sue him. McCay prevailed, however, and received royalties from Bray for several years thereafter.
Other versions
Around 1921, McCay worked on a second animated film featuring Gertie, titled Gertie on Tour. The film would have Gertie visiting New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, bouncing on the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...
and attempting to eat the Washington Monument
Washington Monument
The Washington Monument is an obelisk near the west end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate the first U.S. president, General George Washington...
, among other scenes. The film may have been designed for performance on the vaudville stage; it exists today only in fragments and concept sketches.
A plagiarization of Gertie, from roughly 1915, was distributed for many years, incorrectly identified as McCay's film. Donald Crafton suggests that this other Gertie may have been created by Bray Productions
Bray Productions
Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years before World War I.- History :The studio was founded in December 1914 by J. R. Bray, perhaps the first studio entirely devoted to animation, and series animation at that...
, based on its graphical style.
McCay's son Robert
Bob McCay
Robert Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist during the golden age of comic books. He worked professionally under the names R. Winsor McCay, Winsor McCay Jr., and Bob McCay...
, along with Disney animator Richard Huemer, recreated the original vaudeville performance for the Disneyland
Disney anthology television series
The Walt Disney anthology television series refers to a television series which has been produced by the Walt Disney Company under several different titles from 1955 to 2008...
television program in 1955.
Dinosaur Gertie's is a soft serve ice cream location at Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Hollywood Studios is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort. Spanning 135 acres in size, its theme is show business, drawing inspiration from the heyday of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s...
in Walt Disney World, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
. The building is an example of Programmatic architecture, meaning it is shaped like Dinosaur Gertie. The shop is located on Echo Lake (across from the Giant Sorcerer Hat).
See also
- Animation Before Hollywood: The Silent Period
- List of films in the public domain
External links
- Gertie on Tour at the Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
- Meeting McCay