Put increased pressure on McCay to devote his time to editorial Was not as commercially successful as his earlier efforts, and Hearst His subsequent animation output suffered setbacks, as the film McCay and his assistants spent twenty-two months making theįilm. The film opens with a live-action prologue in which McCay busies himself studying a picture of the Lusitania as a model for his film-in-progress. Working with a group of anonymous assistants on "the first record of the Intertitlesīoast of McCay as "the originator and inventor of Animated Cartoons",Īnd of the 25,000 drawings needed to complete the film. After some time, a German submarine cuts through the waters and fires two torpedo's at the Lusitania, The liner passes the Statue of Liberty and leaves New York Harbor. Which billows smoke that builds until it envelops the screen. Passengers scramble to lower lifeboats, some of which capsize in theĬonfusion. The liner tilts from one side to the other and passengers areĪ second torpedo rocks the Lusitania, which sinks slowly into the deep as more passengers fall off its edges, and the ship submerges amid scenes of drowning bodies. An intertitle declares: "The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser! And yet they tell us not to hate the Hun." Background The liner vanishes from sight, and the film closes with a mother struggling to keep her baby above the waves. Winsor McCay ( c. 1869–1934) produced prodigiously detailed and accurate drawings since early in life. He earned a living as a young man drawing portraits and posters in dime museums, and attracted large crowds with his ability to draw quickly in public. He began working as a newspaper illustrator full-time in 1898, and in 1903 began drawing comic strips. His greatest comic strip success was the children's fantasy comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which he began in 1905. ![]() In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit, doing chalk talks-performances during which he drew in front of a live audience. ![]() German submarines torpedoed and sank the RMS Lusitania in 1915 the incident contributed to the US entry into World War I. Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay said he "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons. His first animated film, Little Nemo (1911), was composed of four thousand drawings on rice paper. ![]() His next film, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), naturalistically shows a giant mosquito draw blood from a sleeping man until it burst. The Germans employed submarines in the North Atlanticĭuring World War I, and in April 1915 the German government issued a McCay followed this with a film that became an interactive part of his vaudeville shows: in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), McCay commanded his animated dinosaur with a whip on stage. Warning that it would target British civilian ships. On May 7, 1915,ĭuring a voyage from New York, the British liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed 128 Americans were among the 1,198 who lost their lives. Newspapers owned by McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst downplayed the tragedy, as Hearst was opposed to the US entering the war. His own papers' readers were increasingly pro-war in the aftermath of the Lusitania.
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