The Silent Era

THE SILENT ERA

The earliest known/existing cartoon as we know it is the 1908 French short film Phantasmagorie by Emile Cohl.

But in the west, thanks to men like Winsor McCay and not to mention Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, who both created iconic cartoon star Felix the Cat, the cartoon industry rapidly expanded, with many new cartoon companies with their own cartoon stars and imitators popping up to cash in on the new cartoon craze. 

The film we will be looking at today will be Gertie the Dinosaur.

This version that we have screen shots of is quite possibly the extended version since the original survived but is less common (Link: https://youtu.be/36gqBoUSJ4M )

The animation of Gertie the Dinosaur which was made by Windsor McCay is quite a kid friendly one, looks really goofy and funny in some places but also really well made.The animation it self isn't as much as a film as it is a tiny episode of sorts. In the back you have the traditional piano music and then you have this beautifully hand drawn animation. Gertie the Dinosaur was drawn with black ink on white rice paper (like much of early animation).  Each piece of paper was only a little larger than a 5 X 7 photo (Which is very small).  McCay said it took around 10,000 drawings, although the figure may be closer to 6,000. The animation also had human interaction with it since each time Gertie was with its creator he would tell it to do things like "Do a barrel roll" and Gertie would do them without hesitation if not with just a bit of sass, the clever thing about this is that the animation was animated to do so, so all the creator needed to do is pretend to ask it to do something at a specific moment which the audience at the time loved.

( Information source links: https://silentology.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/gertie-the-dinosaur/ http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheSilentAgeOfAnimation )