Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

Winsor McCay

Writer:

Winsor McCay (writer)

Release Date:

15 September 1914 (USA)

Genre:

Animation | Short | Comedy | Family

Tagline:

Gertie: she's a scream. She eats, drinks and breathes! She laughs and cries. Dances the tango, answers questions and obeys every command! Yet, she lived millions of years before man inhabited this earth and has never been seen since!!

Plot:

The cartoonist, Winsor McCay, brings the Dinosaurus back to life in the figure of his latest creation, Gertie the Dinosaur.

Plot Keywords:

Dinosaur | Bet | Drawing | Museum | Pumpkin

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Winsor McCay	...	Winsor McCay
George McManus	...	George McManus
Roy L. McCardell	...	Roy McCardell

Also Known As:

Gertie (USA)
Gertie the Trained Dinosaur

Runtime:

12 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

McCay

Trivia:

This film required Winsor McCay and his assistant John A. Fitzsimmons (who traced the backgrounds) to create 10,000 drawings, which they inked on rice paper and mounted on cardboard. Although later animators created techniques (such as the "slash system" and especially celluloid-over-paper) that would eliminate the need to redraw backgrounds or stable objects, McCay was working without precedents. Consequently, he chose to redraw the entire picture -- Gertie and the richly-detailed background -- for each frame.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Gentleman: We've got a puncture. Let's go into the museum while he fixes it.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Les triplettes de Belleville (2003)

A Key Film in Animation History

Winsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur", is an early animation masterpiece that I believe can be enjoyed by both extreme animation buffs, and the average casual viewer. On different levels of course. The average viewer would see a pleasant little film about a baby like dinosaur showing off for us. An animation fanatic like me would see a lot more. For the time it was made, the animation is fantastic. It's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I have seen from that time. The detail is sharp, the movements are smooth, and the backgrounds, all hand drawn frame by frame, are vivid and hardly shake at all. I overheard someone mentioning during the class break that he could see an early use of rotoscoping when "McCay" walks onto the screen. The guy was mistaken. Rotoscoping wasn't invented until the 1930's. This is a testament to McCay's artistry: to make characters so life-like that people still think today that they are real.

That previous statement was in reference to McCay's realistic drawing style. However, it could also be applied to the character of Gertie. She is very believable as a real "person." We come to like Gertie and her child-like antics, understanding her needs to be the focus of attention. I liked the way Gertie tried to hog the screen from Jumbo, first by throwing him into the lake, then by hurtling a rock at him. This of course shows us Gertie's infantile character, but, going back to the artwork, is also a perfect example of McKay's mastery of smooth animated movement. All said, this is probably one of the key films in the transition from cartoon characters just being moving drawings to being characters that we can understand and care about.