Winsor McCay - The Master Edition
by Winsor McCay, J. Stuart Blackton
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: George McManus, Roy L. McCardell, Thomas A. 'Tad' Dorgan, Tom Powers, Winsor McCayDirector: J. Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay
Brand: Image Entertainment
Producer: Winsor McCay
Writer: Winsor McCay
Cinematographer: Walter Arthur
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 105 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Winsor McCay - The Master Edition
Movie Review: Great collection from and tribute to a pioneer in animation
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Winsor McCay - The Master Edition
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