Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (2003)

It's a pleasure to see these restored original prints of the birth of motion-picture character animation in 1911. If you like Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo and Flip preceded Mickey Mouse by 17 years. (If this sounds new to you, Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen is reminiscent of McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland and George McManus' Bringing Up Father starred Jiggs, who could be McCay's Flip if the hobo/scamp joined high society.) The film shorts on this disc are black-and-white and silent -- with placards for narrative and dialog with musical accompaniment. Don't rent this disc looking for Family Guy yuks or Samurai Champloo action. Yes, it's a history lesson -- an actual documentary of the birth of character animation -- but you also need to be able to appreciate the nuances of the art esp. in its birth. McCay was a master caricaturist and quite intuitive about expressing character and telling a story -- but in this earlier, less adrenaline-soaked age, there's a relaxed rapidity and a pioneering as well as an exploratory quality to the pace of his animation. Seeing Flip flip, vamp, and scamp about is amazing (historically speaking). Seeing Gertie the Dinosaur prance coquettishly is an order of magnitude cooler than Steamboat Willie's mechanical bumping up and down. (No one knew what dinosaurs looked like or how they might have moved yet.) McCay's reenactment of the German torpedoing of the luxury liner Lusitania, with 1,960 civilians aboard and the loss of 1,200, in 1915 commemorated that generation's version of the attacks on the World Trade Center. McCay's ouevre is so realistic that it often resembles a film documentary and must have been quite moving in that era. Lighthearted moments abound too esp. in How A Mosquito Operates. McCay made 4,000 drawings in one month to animate Little Nemo and 25,000 drawings to animate the sinking of the Lusitania. He gave up animation in 1921 but continued with newspaper and comic-book cartooning. His genius lives on so long as we have paper and Web sites -- and the light to read by. 3.5 stars.