Customer Reviews

Winsor McCay - The Master Edition

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This is the third time around for the animated shorts of Winsor McCay on video and this is the best version by far. Those of you familiar with the previous Lumivision and Slingshot editions will find the same films as before only this time the source prints are better (for the most part), the piano music by Gabriel Thibaudeaux suits the material better, and the optional commentary from animator John Canemaker gives the necessary background on McCay and his films. For those of you not familiar with Winsor McCay (1867-1934), he was a celebrated comic strip artist whose principal strips LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND and DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND (that's Welsh Rarebit) were mainstays in the Hearst papers during the first decade of the 20th Century. The astonishing quality of the artwork and the imaginative scenarios employed were and still are a marvel to behold.

Between 1911 and 1921 McCay made a series of animated shorts almost entirely drawn by him. The most famous is GERTIE THE DINOSAUR from 1914 presented here for the first time in a copy made from a 35mm print. The initial offering LITTLE NEMO from 1911 was not only drawn by McCay (on rice paper!) but hand-colored by him as well. The propaganda film THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA (1918) remains one of the great achievements in animation history. While the quality of the animation is beyond reproach, some people may be surprised by the dark and disturbing nature of the Rarebit shorts THE PET and THE FLYING HOUSE (both 1921) and HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES (1912). McCay saw animation as an artform and not as a vehicle for popular entertainment. This ultimately forced him to give it up once the likes of FELIX THE CAT took over in the early 20's.

As such these are not cartoons for children but serious films made with adults in mind and they still play better to them today (although my children were quite taken with them). If you have the previous editions you will want to acquire this one for the quality of the prints and the bonus materials. If you don't have them then buy this DVD now and introduce yourself to a true original whose influence on those who followed (especially Walt Disney) can be seen to this day. Winsor McCay was much more than a comic strip creator and an animation pioneer. He was truly a one-of-a-kind artist whose works like those of any great artist will continue to be an endless source of fascination for generations to come. If you get the chance, check out John Canemaker's coffee table book on McCay or any book that reproduces some of his comic strips. They will help to give you a more fully rounded picture of this unique talent.

It is almost sad to read the review below, and hear someone condescending the work of Winsor McKay as a curiosity from the dawn of animation. I am here to say nothing is further from the truth; this animation is some of the finest ever created, vastly outstripping the likes of anything you will see in the cineplex in 2006.

The first time I saw his dramatic rendering of the sinking of the Lusitania, it was an old 16mm print, projected in a private screening room. I was BLOWN AWAY. When the U-boat surfaces, the rippling waves and silhouettes of the soldiers on deck where hauntingly realistic. This film involved me emotionally in the Special FX more than anything in Return of the King to say nothing of most any other Hollywood tripe of late.

So, let's just bring this a little back to reality. Winsor McKay was nothing short of a genius. His portion of the "Masters of the American Comic Book" exhibit here in Los Angeles was hypnotic. No wonder the newest reproduction of his newspaper work is now sold out and selling for 250% of its retail cost on Amazon. If only there were more artists like him around now...

Dispite some obvious technical advances, this still ranks as some of the best animation ever done. It is simple to see how it influenced everyone from Miyazaki to Disney. In particular, the "centaurs" feels very much like a scene from Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke. This film also has scenes of Windsor drawing his figures confidently, which is nice to see. Some of the footage in between the cartoons gets a little corny, but educational nevertheless. It is also easy to see that from the start, animation had elements for adults, and elements that appealed more to kids. "The way a mosquito operates" almost looks like a classical Picasso drawing in motion, except with Windsor's quirky sense of humor which is really always present. If you are interested in animation, check out this dvd. Even if you're dissappointed you will definitely feel you've witnessed the foundation of it all.

Most people don't know who Winsor McCay is. He is, in fact, a cartoonist and animator from the silent film era that inspired the work of people like Walt Disney. He was almost completely forgotten from the 1920's until the 1970's when some of his animations were first restored and exhibited. This DVD set has remastered versions of his ten surviving animations. McCay was the creator of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" comic strip. Nemo was a little boy haunted by Freddie Kruger like dreams circa 1910, and the strip would always end by the boy awakening and being scolded for crying in his sleep. McCay carries this idea of the surreal and grotesque attacking people in their sleep in his early animations "How a Mosquito Operates," "Bug Vaudeville," and "The Pet". These are not children's cartoons by a long shot. In each one, human anxieties bleed over into nightmares. In "How a Mosquito Operates" a hungry mosquito follows a man home and prepares to feed on him, but the man keeps waking up. The mosquito gets a little too greedy and the cartoon ends with the mosquito exploding due to engorging himself. "Bug Vaudeville" shows various insects performing feats to entertain the audience. "The Pet" shows a creature that looks something like a dog that meows taken in by the dreamer's wife. "The pet" has a great appetite, and each time it eats it grows larger until it becomes menacing in size.

Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay's best-known creation, was originally part of McCay's vaudeville act and is the star of two animations on this DVD. McCay would introduce Gertie to the audience as the world's first trained dinosaur, even cracking a whip at her to make her perform. Why anybody would want to crack a whip at Gertie, though, is anyone's guess. She's such a big friendly herbivore. McCay would interact with Gertie to the point of tossing her an apple to get her to behave. The title cards on the DVD are meant to mimic what McCay was actually saying to Gertie during the act. "Sinking of the Lusitania" is probably McCay's best known work. It is timed so well that you feel like you are watching a filming of the disaster as human figures leap to their deaths from the sinking ship's stern, and McCay turns this truly outrageous event of history into a very effective propaganda tool. The ship and its motion, along with the smoke billowing out after its impact with the torpedoes, appear so realistic they are almost photographic in nature.

There are a pair of incomplete experiments ("The Centaurs" and "Flip's Circus") and a fragment of a Gertie sequel, in which our favorite dinosaur plays with a train and then dreams about performing in front of a crowd of dinosaurs. These might have been meant as part of McCay's vaudeville act too. McCay's animations show that he was an excellent draftsman with a fine sense of perspective whose animations had very natural looking motion in them fifteen years before Disney began his work in the field. He also credibly gave his creations weight, such as when Gertie is taking a drink out of the lake and the bank realistically crumbles beneath her tremedous girth. However, McCay wasn't very good at creating memorable characters suitable for serial animations outside of Gertie.

Animation scholar John Canemaker fills in some of the history behind these shorts on an informative commentary track. He does a very good job of helping the audience understand McCay's importance to the history of animation and even his possible motivations for entering and then abruptly exiting the field of animation. His 1976 documentary, Remembering Winsor McCay, consists of an interview with one of McCay's surviving assistants. Finally, there is a gallery of photos that show McCay's family, some shots of his studio, and even some pages out of his diary.

I recommend this to any fan of early cinema, and to those who might need a reminder that when it comes to the history of animation, Uncle Walt did not come first.

This wonderful disc brings together all of Winsor McCay's known surviving films, made between 1911 and 1921, although some of them, such as 'The Centaurs,' are just fragments, and some of the dates they were made is unknown. Though Mr. McCay actually was not the inventor of animated cartoons, as was often claimed in his day, he was still one of the very first cartoonists to bring drawings to life, and was the father of the personality cartoon, creating cartoon characters such as Gertie the Dinosaur and the Rarebit Fiend whom the viewer gets to know and feel for, much like Disney began doing with their cartoons in the Thirties.

'Little Nemo' (1911) is also available on 'Landmarks of Early Film, Volume One,' but this version is slightly different, particularly in that much of the animation is hand-colored. This one is also notable for being one of the few known surviving films the largely forgotten popular comedian John Bunny appeared in. John is the white-haired and somewhat rotund gentleman. It's followed by 'How a Mosquito Operates' (1912), which may disturb the more squeamish, even though it really gives this bothersome bloodsucker a personality and shows that he's intelligent. The next short on the disc is McCay's best-known cartoon, 'Gertie the Dinosaur' (1914), which is also widely considered his masterpiece. Gertie is so cute, sweet, and charming, like a big lumbering dinosaur who nevertheless has the mind of an impish little kid. The fourth short is the blatantly propagandistic 'The Sinking of the Lusitania' (1918). Although the actual sinking of the ship and the carnage that follows is very realistic and historically accurate, today we no longer have such a simplistic view on why the ship was sunk. For example, there were warnings that such a thing might happen, the American and British governments were at just as much fault in ignoring warnings as the German government was in firing the torpedo, the Lusitania was carrying some pretty hefty ammunition and wasn't just some innocent ship on an innocent trip to England (and therefore made it a legit target under the rules of warfare), and the second explosion was not from another German torpedo but rather from an explosion somewhere on the ship. I'm also glad to know I'm not alone in finding the final title card to be distasteful, urging the public to hate the German people instead of just their government or the person responsible for the attack (though race-based propaganda in wartime seems inevitable), and in how the deaths of some millionaires and celebrities (whom I'd never even heard of) are the ones being eulogised, as though their deaths were more worthy of being mourned that of all of the people down in steerage, esp. considering McCay seemed to have been rather progressive in his social and political outlook.

The rest of the cartoons are 'The Centaurs,' 'Gertie's on Tour' (sadly only survives in a short fragment, thus depriving Gertie of much of her original charm and personality), 'Flip's Circus,' and three cartoons based on McCay's very popular 'Dream of a Rarebit Fiend' comic strip, 'Bug Vaudeville,' 'The Pet,' and 'The Flying House.' Extras are a brief 1976 featurette, 'Remembering Winsor McCay,' audio commentary by historian John Canemaker, and a quite large gallery of stills, comic strips, pictures, letters, and other memorabilia. Although it might not interest a more casual viewer, it's an invaluable treasure-trove of early film, particularly early animation. It might not be as technically advanced or well-known as the films made by Disney, but these characters have a lot of personality and charm, and the plots are so interesting. People in the Teens and early Twenties wouldn't have cared that these examples of animation weren't technically very complex, since they didn't have any examples from decades later to unfairly compare them against.

What a way to see McCay's genius. The films are high quality and as complete as possible. You can just watch them without John Canemaker's insights or turn on the comments to learn even more about the man and what he was doing. Winsor McCay created the art of animated movies. You can see in these films the ground work upon which the Disney Studios built their captivating movies. You can also see for yourself how modern producers pay subtle homage to McCay in their movies. It's even fun to just watch them!

This collection contains the surviving films, complete and incomplete, from the man who called himself the "inventor of animated cartoons." Although McCay's animated output dates from 1911 to 1921, other American animators would not produce work comparable to "Gertie the Dinosaur," "The Sinking of the Lusitania," or "The Flying House" until well into the 1930s.

Because these cartoons can be found on YouTube and other streaming-video sites, only die-hard animation buffs need purchase this particular DVD. Still, the presentation here is superb, especially given the condition of the materials. Animation historian John Canemaker provides knowledgeable audio commentary, and even tosses in a brief archival interview with one of McCay's assistants.

this was an excellent DVD with many clips from his animation career. Winsor McCay is pretty much hidden from the public view but his impact on the current technology of animation is legendary. Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur is the first successful animation in history! Not only that but the first interactive multimedia stage performance as well. Great examples of this master's work. Disney owes much of it's success to this person who started long before the mouse showed it's ears on film. You can even see a tribute to Gertie at MGM's Lake "dino ice cream".

[...]

This collection is essential for fans of animation. Not only are these THE first animated cartoons ever made, but they have never been surpassed in their visual quality, not even by the Fleischers. The only reason why I take away one star is because there is very little storytelling and a great deal of repetition within most of the cartoons. This might be an unfair way to judge such pioneering work, but those problems do make the cartoons harder to sit through.

The first two cartoons in the collection begin with film footage of McCay betting others that he can make moving cartoons (this is based upon real events) then end with him winning the bet, with the actual cartoons shown in the middle consisting of little more than McCay showing off what he can do. These two cartoons are visually impressive, but are especially repetetive. Most of the other cartoons are a bit better, but tend to consist of only one idea done to death (e.g. dancing bugs), but they are still miles ahead of any of Disney's old musical cartoons, are stunning to look at, and often have a surreal quality which can at times be a bit disturbing vs. just cutesy.

The cartoons which do the best job at telling actual stories are "The Sinking of the Lusitania" and "The Pet". "The Sinking of the Lusitania" is outright propaganda which gives a naive perspective on a deliberately staged tragedy -- the ship was filled with weaponry bound for England and they were repeatedly warned by the Germans that they would be sunk if they continued with their mission despite their use of human shields, and Europeans on both sides were involved in colonial expansion at the time (which is why WWI is so different than WWII) so its attempts to paint Germans as "evil" are highly arbitrary and hypocritical. Of course, its one-sidedness, near-racist attitudes, and blatant attempts to exploit tragedy to mobilize the population into violent reaction against "evil" Germans are to be expected, but is still distateful. It is nevertheless an interesting historical artifact.

If he's remembered at all today, Winsor McCay is probably best known for his 1914 animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur. Although more famous in his day as the creator of the Little Nemo comic strip, McCay earned a degree of immortality and rights to the title of father of animation for Gertie.
WINSOR MCCAY: THE MASTER EDITION includes all known animation by McCay, nine solo efforts and one he made in collaboration with his son Robert.
As historic artifacts I enjoyed these short animations quite a bit. Independent animator and animation historian John Canemaker's commentary tracks helped in provide information on McCay's life and vaudeville and newspaper work.
It's a different story when considering their entertainment value. While films like Gertie, Little Nemo, and The Sinking of the Lusitania are interesting, and certainly well drawn with smooth animation, it's obvious that the art of animation has evolved tremendously since the days McCay put pen to rice paper. Still, it's hard to take points away from someone who created the techniques because he has mastered all their permutations.
Highly recommended for fans of animation who are interested in the art form's roots.