Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (), after producing about a minute of footage.
Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had earlier made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier; Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films". Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films—some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments—and has been preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" since 1991.
In 1994, Gertie the Dinosaur was voted #6 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.
Background
Winsor McCay ( – 1934) had worked prolifically as a commercial artist and cartoonist by the time he started making newspaper comic strips such as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–11) and his signature strip Little Nemo (1905–14). In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit, doing chalk talks—performances in which he drew before live audiences.
Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons. He claimed that he "was the first man in the world to make animated cartoons", though he was preceded by the American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl. McCay's first film starred his Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911; he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act. He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates, in which a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man. McCay gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmare situation. His animation was criticized as being so lifelike that he must have traced the characters from photographs or resorted to tricks using wires; to show that he had not, McCay chose for his next film a creature that could not have been photographed.
McCay conferred with the American Historical Society in 1912 and announced plans for "the presentation of pictures showing the great monsters that used to inhabit the earth". He spoke of the "serious and educational work" that the animation process could enable. McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, such as a March 4, 1905, episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race, and a May 25, 1913, Rarebit Fiend episode in which a hunter unsuccessfully targets a dinosaur; the layout of the background to the latter bore a strong resemblance to what later appeared in Gertie. In the September 21, 1913, episode of McCay's Little Nemo strip In the Land of Wonderful Dreams, titled "In the Land of the Antediluvians", Nemo meets a blue dinosaur named Bessie which has the same design as that of Gertie.
McCay considered a number of names before settling on "Gertie"; his production notebooks used "Jessie the ". Disney animator Paul Satterfield recalled hearing McCay in 1915 relate how he had chosen the name "Gertie":
Content
Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. Its star Gertie does tricks much like a trained elephant. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time; she breathes rhythmically, she shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. McCay imbued her with a personality—while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands.