Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act. Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, and Walt Disney.
About Gertie the Dinosaur in brief
Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act. Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, and Walt Disney. The film has been preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ in 1991. It was voted #6 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field in 1994. It has been voted #1 of the best animated films ever made by the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and #2 of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, as well as the European Academy of Animated Arts and Techniques, and the Royal Academy of Arts and Science, among others. The original version of the film was released by William Randolph Hearst’s W.R.P. Hearst Company in 1913. It starred McCay’s Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911; he soon incorporated it into his act. In 1913, McCay made an episode of In the Land of Wonderful Dreams in which a dinosaur meets a blue dinosaur named Bie, which has the same design as that of the blue dinosaur in his strip.
In the episode, Bie meets a land-dwelling Antilessess, called Land the Antediless, in which he meets a green dinosaur named Land the Landed Ants. The name Bie was chosen by McCay after hearing a couple of sweet boys talking out in the hall. He thought it was a good name for a girl, but wanted it to be a girl’s name instead of a sweet boy, so he chose a sweet, sweet girl named Jessie. He also used a number of names before settling on his production name, including Bertie and Bertie Dinosaur. The first film starred his Little NemO characters and debuting in 1911. He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates, in where a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man. McCy gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmare situation. He claimed to be the first man in the world to make animated cartoons, though he was preceded by American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay’s animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of G Bertie that appeared a year or two after the original. In 1912 McCay announced plans for \”the presentation of pictures showing the great monsters that used to inhabit the earth\”. McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work.
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This page is based on the article Gertie the Dinosaur published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
