ANIMATION LEGEND: WINSOR McCAY
Ratings (1-10): content: 7 / video: 8 / audio: 7 / overall: 7.
Contents: Winsor McCay and His Moving Comics (1911) [AKA Little Nemo],
How a Mosquito Operates (1912), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), The Sinking
of the Lusitania (1918), fragments of The Centaurs (c. 1918-1921), fragments
of Gertie On Tour (c. 1918-1921), Flip's Circus (c. 1918-1921), Bug Vaudeville
(1921), The Pet (1921) and The Flying House (1921).
Review Copyright © 1999 by Carl Bennett.
To those who know his work, Winsor McCay represents the pinnacle in early
20th century newspaper comics illustrators. McCay's superlative command
of detail and perspective combined with his fantastical imagination made
him one of the most popular illustrators of his time and one of the most
influential of this century's artists.
McCay also became a successful live performer, drawing "lightning
sketches" with chalk on blackboard in just a few moments before vaudeville
audiences. With this collection of animation works, modern audiences can
rediscover another aspect of Winsor McCay -- the pioneering master of
animation.
Inspired by small advertising flip books brought to his attention by
his son, Winsor McCay began experimenting with applying animation to motion
pictures. For nearly a year McCay worked around his newspaper reponsibilities
and his vaudeville obligations, producing the sequential drawings that
would make up his first animated film Winsor McCay and His Moving Comics
(1911) [AKA Little Nemo]. The animation section was bracketed by live-action
footage of McCay, fellow cartoonist George McManus and Vitagraph comedy
star John Bunny. McCay wagers that he can, in one month, make drawings
that will move. His friends think he is crazy. McCay's month is up (compressed
from the real-life year) and shows the results of his work to his friends.
Characters from McCay's popular weekly strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland,
then tumble and cavort on-screen in America's first sustained animated
film.
The print used for the video transfer features original hand-coloring
during the animation section. The 35mm print is worn but generally in
very good shape (with a brief section lost to nitrate film decomposition).
McCay's second film, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), follows the attack
of the persistent mosquito on a sleeping man. It is the first of McCay's
animated films that attempts a story narrative and characterization. The
35mm print is again worn but in very good condition.
A live-action prologue was prepared, along the lines of McCay's first
film, to start this version. The video transfer of this film was prepared
from the best sections of 35mm and 16mm prints of Gertie.
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) is one of animation's finest achievements
ever and is, undeniably, the first animated masterpiece. McCay produced
his most ambitious and most impressive film of his career in this narrative
accounting of the event that precipitated the beginning of World War I.
The film is undeniably propaganda, with its decidedly anti-German position
intended to bolster continued support for the Allied cause. It is also
an emotional dramatic film, playing heavily on the sympathetic heartstrings
of the audience. Its level of artistic and narrative realism had never
been achieved before and would not be matched (even in McCay's later works)
for many years to come. We are very impressed with this animation of the
billows of smoke coming from the dying Lusitania, blowing in the sea winds,
and in the animation of the people leaping from the sinking stern of the
boat. For the opportunity to own this film alone it is worth buying this
DVD. The 35mm print from which the transfer was taken is worn but still
in very good to good condition.
On one hand it is a shame that this masterpiece has not survived in better
condition, on the other hand the fact that it has survived at all is a
blessing on modern audiences, who may still have the opportunity to experience
this crowning achievement.
The three films that follow may have been nothing more than experiments,
certainly two of them survive as nothing more than fragments. The Centaurs
(c. 1918-1921) is a brief pastoral visit with an extended family of centaurs.
The 35mm print is in very good to excellent condition, although it is
missing one shot that is present in the version included the Library of
Congress/Smithsonian Video The Origins of Film series Origins of American
Animation collection. Gertie On Tour (c. 1918-1921) may have been an aborted
attempt to recapture the past success of the previous Gertie film. The
35mm print transfer here looks better than the transfer available on the
Origins collection. Of the three films here that did not make it into
distribution, Flip's Circus (c. 1918-1921) appears to have been the closest
to being a finalized film. The surviving film is apparently a print taken
from the original animation camera negative.
It includes the animation cameraman's notes (written in chalk on a small
blackboard and photographed as single frames) to the film's editor. These
are notes as to which intertitles are to be inserted where, which intertitles
have yet to be written and noting unnecessary animation frames that are
to be edited out of the final film. The 35mm print is in excellent condition.
Bug Vaudeville (1921), The Pet (1921) and The Flying House (1921) are
all installments from McCay's film series adaptation of his popular Dreams
of a Rarebit Fiend comic strip. The premise is, as always, that after
eating rarebit cheese people will fall alseep and have unusual fantasy
dreams. Bug Vaudeville is taken from a worn but very good 35mm print.
The Pet and The Flying House are taken from very good 16mm prints. The
16mm print of The Flying House is over-cropped on all sides and thus loses
parts of the word balloons that carry the characters' dialogue. 35mm fragments
of The Flying House are also included on the disc.
The prints that were used for the video transfer came from a collection
of some eight dozen film cans of Winsor McCay films given to Irving Mendelsohn
by Robert Winsor McCay, Winsor's son.
The films were stored in Mendelsohn's Long Island garage for many years,
until they were "discovered" by Robert N. Brotherton. Many of
the films had decomposed, but Brotherton and Mendelsohn sought out some
means to save the remaining films. Eventually La Cinémathèque
Québécoise in Montreal provided the means to rescue the
films presented on this DVD. We are grateful for this eleventh hour reprieve.
All films are presented in "windowbox" format. We totally endorse
this method of silent film presentation, since some silent films (particularly
those surviving only in 16mm reduction prints) are overcropped on video
transfers, cutting off the tops of heads and the sides of intertitles.
This allows the total surviving image area to be seen on all televisions,
regardless of the amount of your TV's overscan cropping.
The DVD features a very good music score performed on MIDI-based synthesizers.
While we are not fans of synthesizer soundtracks for silent films, the
Lumivision scores are of better quality than other silent film synthesizer
presentations on home video.
Overall, the DVD (which is identical to Lumivision's 1993 laserdisc release
of this program) is of high-quality and is quite pleasing. We recommend
this disc to animation fans and McCay devotees.
Note: Lumivision's September 30, 1997 DVD release of this film (catalog
number DVD1397), was used for this review. That edition originally sold
for $24.95 and is now out-of-print. The Slingshot Entertainment DVD rerelease
features the same program.
Comparison of Winsor McCay and His Moving Comics (1911) [AKA Little Nemo]
on Animation Legend: Winsor McCay and on Landmarks of Early Film, Volume
1.Recommended Winsor McCay books: John Canemaker's Winsor McCay: His Life
and Art [out-of-print], The Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland [out-of-print],
The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland Volume 1 [out-of-print], Volume
2 [out-of-print], Volume 3 [out-of-print], Volume 4 [out-of-print], Volume
5 [out-of-print] and Volume 6 [out-of-print].
review source: www.silentera.com