![]() The late Paul Terry, the father of Terry-Toons, often credited McCay for arousing his and others’ interest in animated cartoons, at a time when most people did not fully grasp the potential of the medium. Reportedly they were awed by the dinosaur’s lifelike movements, unaware that what they had seen would change the course of animation’s young history for the better. ![]() ![]() In the film, the animator (McCay) is seen drawing the cartoon, in live action, slowly bringing Gertie into existence and into the real world to then try to tame the beast.Īudiences did not share critics’ opinions. It was a tremendous technical achievement, but surprisingly most critics felt the production lost audiences with its story line. The one-reel short was animated on six-by-eight-inch sheets of translucent rice paper, with the drawings lightly penciled first and then detailed in Higgins black ink. The first film to feature frame-by-frame animation and fluid, sophisticated movement, it took McCay approximately 10,000 drawings to animate the five-minute production. While the films of all three men were important to the growth of the cartoon industry, McCay may have done more for the art of animation than his predecessors when he created what many historians consider to be the first genuine American cartoon star in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Based on his own beloved New York Herald strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, McCay reportedly spent four years animating the production. McCay surpassed even Cohl’s landmark effort with his first entry, Little Nemo, the first fully animated cartoon. The film was everything that an animated cartoon was supposed to be-funny, sophisticated and well conceived. The concept of animated cartoons in this country ultimately took root thanks to two other foresighted pioneers: French cartoonist Emil Cohl and American newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay.Ĭohl followed Blackton with a stick-figure animated short presented in a series of comic vignettes entitled Fantasmagorie (1908). For the era in which it was made, the simplistically styled one-reel short was an important first step. The film is composed of a series of scenes featuring letters, words and faces drawn by an “unseen” hand. Released by Vitagraph, cartoonist James Stuart Blackton, who sold his first cartoon to the New York World and cofounded Vitagraph, entered the animation business with this first effort six years after his nonanimated triumph, The Enchanted Drawing, a stop-motion short Edison film based on the newspaper cartoonist’s “chalk-talk” vaudeville act.īy today’s standards of animation, Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is rudimentary at best. The beginning was 1906, with the debut of the first animated film in this country, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. But, like any untested product, it was just a matter of time before the technique of animation would be mastered, creating a visually perfect running machine with plenty of mileage still ahead. In the days of silent cartoons, the industry experienced a tremendous backlash of criticism from film critics, movie fans and even studio executives who felt the new medium lacked congruent stories and consistent animation quality to be taken seriously in the world of entertainment. It is funny, in a strange sort of way, but animated cartoons were not always held in such high esteem. Why this long-running love affair with cartoons? Why do so many people still watch their favorite cartoon characters in countless television reruns? And why do new characters and new ideas still turn on audiences today? The reason for this amazing phenomenon is simple: Animated cartoons are the embodiment of a fantasy world worth treasuring, worth enjoying and, most of all, worth remembering over and over again, no matter what place in time or what changes have occurred in the real world around it.
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