ABSTRACT
In his newspaper comic strips and his vaudeville act, McCay's interest in, and his gift for, depicting motion and sequential action anticipate his entry into animated films. Little Nemo (1911), his first, stars characters from his famed comic strip. McCay had few predecessors in the nascent field of animation, for example, James Stuart Blackton and Emile Cohl. What differed McCay from other early animators of the time was his ability to animate sequential drawings with no compromise in linear detail. Also, his characters have fluid motion, naturalistic timing, and a feeling of weight, all of which became synonymous with Walt Disney in the 1930s. Equally important for Disney and all character animators: McCay was the first to inject individualistic personality traits into animated characters in his films, such as How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and Gertie (1914), a trained dinosaur. McCay's ten known films are analyzed in detail in this chapter, including his monumental The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), in which he pioneered serious subject matter in animation in a documentary form to present a vivid depiction of a real event.
