Gertie the Dinosaur is an animated short film released in 1914 by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the first animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay initially presented the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie performed tricks at her master's command. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed his vaudeville activities, prompting McCay to add a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release, which was renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (), after producing about a minute of footage.
Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had previously made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier. Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films". Gertie was the first film to employ several animation techniques, like keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators, including the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques. It is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films, some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments. In 1991, the U.S. Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Background
Winsor McCay ( – 1934) had already worked prolifically as a commercial artist and cartoonist by the time he began creating newspaper comic strips such as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–1911) and his signature strip Little Nemo (1905–1914). In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit as well, doing chalk talks—performances in which he drew pictures before live audiences.
Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay recognized the potential to create "moving pictures" from his cartoons. He claimed to be the first man in the world to make animated cartoons, but he was preceded by the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl. McCay's first film starred his Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911; he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act. He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates, in which a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man. McCay gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmarish situation. His animation was criticized as being so lifelike that he must have traced the characters from photographs or resorted to tricks using wires. To show that he had not, McCay chose for his next film a creature that could not have been photographed.
In 1912, McCay consulted with the American Historical Society and announced plans to create a presentation featuring depictions of the great monsters that once roamed the earth. He spoke of the "serious and educational work" that the animation process could enable. McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, like the March 4, 1905, episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race, and the May 25, 1913, Rarebit Fiend episode in which a hunter unsuccessfully targets a dinosaur; the layout of the background to the latter bore a strong resemblance to what later appeared in Gertie. In the September 21, 1913, episode of McCay's Little Nemo strip In the Land of Wonderful Dreams, titled "In the Land of the Antediluvians", Nemo meets a blue dinosaur named Bessie which has the same design as that of Gertie.
McCay considered several names before settling on "Gertie"; his production notebooks used "Jessie the ". Disney animator Paul Satterfield recalled hearing McCay in 1915 relate how he had chosen the name "Gertie":
Content
Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. Its star, Gertie, performs tricks much like a trained elephant. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time: she breathes rhythmically, shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. McCay imbued her with a personality—while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands.
Synopsis The frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave after being called by her master McCay, eating a boulder and a tree on the way. The whip-wielding McCay orders her to do tricks like raising her foot or bowing to the audience. After being distracted by a sea serpent, Gertie nips back at her master. McCay scolds Gertie for this, which makes her cry, and he subsequently placates her with a pumpkin. Gertie eats the leftover tree trunk, and tosses a mammoth named Jumbo into the lake; when Jumbo teases her by spraying her with water, she hurls a boulder at it as it swims away. After a flying lizard catches Gertie's attention, she quenches her thirst by draining the lake. McCay then has her carry him offstage while he bows to the audience.
In the live-action framing story added for later distribution, McCay and friends suffer a flat tire in front of the American Museum of Natural History. They enter the museum and, while viewing a Brontosaurus skeleton, McCay wagers a dinner that he can bring a dinosaur to life with his animation skills. The animation process and its "10,000 drawings, each a little different from the one preceding it" is put on display, with humorous scenes of mountains of paper, some of which an assistant drops. When the film is finished, the friends gather to view it in a restaurant.
Production
Gertie was McCay's first piece of animation with detailed backgrounds. Main production began in mid-1913. Working in his spare time, McCay drew thousands of frames of Gertie on sheets of mulberry paper, a medium good for drawing as it did not absorb ink. Since it was translucent, it was also ideal for the laborious retracing of backgrounds, a job that fell to art student neighbor John A. Fitzsimmons. The drawings themselves occupied a area of the paper, marked with registration marks in the corners to reduce jittering of the images when filmed. They were photographed mounted on large pieces of stiff cardboard.
McCay was concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine the timing of Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's weight. McCay consulted with New York museum staff to ensure the accuracy of Gertie's movements; the staff were unable to help him find out how an extinct animal would stand up from a lying position, so in a scene in which Gertie stood up, McCay had a flying lizard come on screen to draw away viewers' attention. When the drawings were finished, they were photographed at Vitagraph Studios in early 1914.
McCay pioneered the "McCay Split System" of animation, in which major poses or positions were drawn first and the intervening frames drawn after. This relieved tedium and improved the timing of the film's actions. McCay was open about the techniques that he developed, and refused to patent his system, reportedly saying: "Any idiot that wants to make a couple of thousand drawings for a hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club." During production of Gertie, he showed the details to a visitor who claimed to be writing an article about animation. The visitor was animator John Randolph Bray, who sued McCay in 1914 after taking advantage of McCay's lapse to patent many of the techniques, including the use of registration marks, tracing paper, and the Mutoscope action viewer, as well as the cycling of drawings to create repetitive action. The suit was unsuccessful, and there is evidence that McCay may have countersued—he received royalty payments from Bray for licensing the techniques.
Release
Gertie the Dinosaur first appeared as part of McCay's vaudeville act in early 1914. It appeared in movie theaters in an edition with a live-action prologue, distributed by William Fox's Box Office Attractions Company from December 28. Dinosaurs were still new to the public imagination at the time of Gertie's release—a Brontosaurus skeleton was put on public display for the first time in 1905. Advertisements reflected this by trying to educate audiences: "According to science this monster once ruled this planet ... Skeletons now being unearthed measuring from 90 ft. to 160 ft. in length. An elephant should be a mouse beside Gertie."
Vaudeville McCay originally used a version of the film as part of his vaudeville act. The first performance was on February 8, 1914, in Chicago at the Palace Theater. McCay began the show making his customary live sketches, which he followed with How a Mosquito Operates. He then appeared on stage with a whip and lectured the audience on the making of animation. Standing to the right of the film screen, he introduced "the only dinosaur in captivity". As the film started, Gertie poked her head out of a cave, and McCay encouraged her to come forward. He reinforced the illusion with tricks such as tossing a cardboard apple at the screen, at which point he turned his back to the audience and pocketed the apple as it appeared in the film for Gertie to eat. For the finale, McCay walked offstage from where he "reappeared" in the film; Gertie lifted up the animated McCay, placed him on her back, and walked away as McCay bowed to the audience.
The show soon moved to New York. Though reviews were positive, McCay's employer at the New York American, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was displeased that his star cartoonist's vaudeville schedule interrupted his work illustrating editorials. At Hearst's orders, reviews of McCay's shows disappeared from the Americans pages. Shortly after, Hearst refused to run paid advertisements from the Victoria Theater, where McCay performed in New York. On March 8, Hearst announced a ban on artists in his employ from performing in vaudeville. McCay's contract did not prohibit him from his vaudeville performances, but Hearst was able to pressure McCay and his agents to cancel bookings, and eventually McCay signed a new contract barring him from performing outside of greater New York.
Movie theaters
In November 1914, film producer William Fox offered to market Gertie the Dinosaur to moving-picture theaters for "spot cash and highest prices". McCay accepted, and extended the film to include a live-action prologue and intertitles to replace his stage patter. The film successfully traveled the country and had reached the west coast by December.
The live-action sequence was likely shot on November 19, 1914. It features McCay with several of his friends, such as cartoonists George McManus and Tad Dorgan, writer Roy McCardell, and actor Tom Powers; McCay's son Robert had a cameo as a camera-room assistant. McCay used a bet as a plot device, as he had previously in the Little Nemo film.
2018 reconstruction of McCay's vaudeville act