Like many pioneers, the work of 'Winsor McCay' has been
largely superseded by successors such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer
but he more than earns a place in film history for being the American
cinema's first great cartoon animator. He started out as a newspaper
cartoonist, achieving a national reputation for his strips 'Little
Nemo in Slumberland' and 'Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend'. Inspired by
his son's flick-books, he spent four years and produced four thousand
individual drawings in making his first animated cartoon 'Little
Nemo', completing it in 1911. But his biggest cartoon success was
'Gertie the Dinosaur' (1913), which was the centrepiece of a vaudeville
act in which the live McCay would interact with his cartoon character.
For this, he single-handedly produced ten thousand individual drawings,
laboriously re-drawing the background every time. It is often wrongly
cited as the first animated cartoon, but it was certainly the first
successful one, and influenced dozens of imitators. His 1918 production
'The Sinking of the Lusitania' was even more ambitious: comprising
25,000 drawings, it was the first feature-length American cartoon,
and the second one made anywhere. He retired from film-making in
the 1920s, but would subsequently describe himself as "the
creator of animated cartoons". This honour, strictly speaking,
belongs to the Frenchman Emile Cohl - but McCay was certainly the
first to bring them to a wide audience.
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