#windsor mckay

[browsethestacksofficial]

Vintage Comic Strip - Little Nemo In Slumberland (Dec05th1909)

Art by Windsor McCay

[mafermette]

Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

[yesterdaysprint]

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Silas, El Paso Herald, Texas, April 24, 1909

[providencepubliclibrary]

Windsor McKay’s “Little Nemo In Slumberland.” Do not go near the ill-fated film adaptation!

[browsethestacks]

Little Nemo In Slumberland by Windsor McKay

[gentle-starlight]

Thank you Slumberland for retooling Flip from a derogatory portrayal of the Irish as a “missing link” between African and Caucasian people to a cynical outlaw ram guy with fangs and Beetlejuice energy

[smolmurderbean]

The live action version of Little Nemo is Slumberland is going to ruin search results forever. It's going to be so hard to find new art of cartoon and comic version Flip and it was already almost impossible. Now it's just going to be 1000 pictures of Jason Momoa.........

I feel sick and hurt like of course it's not personal but Little Nemo in Slumberland and Flip the Clown means so much to me, the comic, and the cartoon. This movie is going to make it SO much harder to find content from either of those....

[chris-wasden]

For our Weekly Animation Spotlight: a trip WAY back in time, to 1914: Gertie the Dinosaur, by animator pioneer Windsor McKay. (You can skip to about 6 minutes in to start seeing the animation.) 

Gertie the Dinosaur was originally part of a vaudeville show that McKay put on. He would talk to Gertie, give her commands, talk to her (this version of the film has titles of what McKay would say to Gertie while they were on stage performing) - and audiences were astonished to see that this picture of a dinosaur was interacting back! (Remember, in the 1910s, silent films were growing in popularity, but back in 1914, animation was still a brand new field that only a few people had delved into; most film were experiments instead of stories like we watch today.) What’s more, this dinosaur had a personality! She cried, she sulked, she played and bowed to the audience.

During his lifetime, Windsor McKay created a lot of techniques that were used for the first time, like inbetweening, cycling, and other things. These techniques helped make drawing animation more efficient, which every animator is grateful for, I’m sure. (Apparently McKay didn’t patent these new techniques; he said, “Any idiot that wants to make a couple of thousand drawings for a few hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club.” 

10000 drawings, to be precise. What’s more, McKay’s assistant, John A. Fitzsimmons, traced that background for each of those frames. Now that’s dedication.