How a Mosquito Operates

How a Mosquito Operates is a 1912 silent animated film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short depicts a giant mosquito tormenting a sleeping man. The film is one of the earliest works of animation, and its technical quality is considered far ahead of its contemporaries.

About How a Mosquito Operates in brief

Summary How a Mosquito OperatesHow a Mosquito Operates is a 1912 silent animated film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short depicts a giant mosquito tormenting a sleeping man. The film is one of the earliest works of animation, and its technical quality is considered far ahead of its contemporaries. McCay had a reputation for his proficient drawing skills, best remembered in the elaborate cartooning of the children’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland he began in 1905. He delved into the emerging art of animation with the film Little NemO, and followed its success by adapting an episode of his comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend into How a Mosqito Operate. He further developed the character animation he introduced in Mosquino with his best-known animated work, Gertie the Dinosaur. The animated sequences in Little Nema have no plot: much like the early experiments of Émile Cohl, McCay used his first film to demonstrate the medium’s capabilities—with fanciful sequences demonstrating motion for its own sake.

The mosquito has a personality: egotistical, persistent, and calculating. It makes eye contact with the viewers and waves at them. It does push-ups on the man’s nose and flips its hat in the air. In its excitement as it feeds, the mosquito finds itself so engorged with blood that it must lie down. It becomes so bloated and drunk that it cannot fly away until it becomes an alcoholic gorges itself on an gorging on an alcoholic drink. Vaudeville acts and humor magazines commonly joked about large New Jersey mosquitoes they called “Jersey Skeeters” McCay began working on the film in May 1911. Shortly after he left the New York Herald of Randolph William Randolph for the Times Herald of New York. He declared himself “the first man in the world to make animated cartoons”, though the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile cohl were among those who had made earlier ones.