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#AceHistoryDesk – Little Nemo (1911 film) Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, more commonly known as Little Nemo, is a 1911 silentanimated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay.

One of the earliest animated films, it was McCay’s first, and featured characters from McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Its expressive character animation distinguished the film from the experiments of earlier animators.

Inspired by flip books his son brought home, McCay came to see the potential of the animated film medium. He claimed to be the first to make such films, though James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl were among those who preceded him. The short’s four thousand drawings on rice paper were shot at Vitagraph Studios under Blackton’s supervision. Most of the film’s running time is made up of a live-action sequence in which McCay bets his colleagues that he can make drawings that move. He wins the bet with four minutes of animation in which the Little Nemocharacters perform, interact, and metamorphose to McCay’s whim.

Little Nemo debuted in movie theaters on April 8, 1911, and four days later McCay began using it as part of his vaudeville act.

Its good reception motivated him to hand-color each of the animated frames of the original black-and-white film. The film’s success led McCay to devote more time to animation. He followed up Little Nemo with How a Mosquito Operatesin 1912 and his best-known film, Gertie the Dinosaur, in 1914.

In 2009, Little Nemo was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Background: James Stuart Blackton used chalk drawings to animate Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).

Winsor McCay (c. 1867–71 – 1934)^[a] 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)^[b]and his signature strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–14).^[c] In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit, doing chalk talkperformances in which he drew before live audiences.

Inspired by flip books his son Robert brought home, McCay said he “came to see the possibility of making moving pictures” of his cartoons.

McCay, then in his early forties, asserted he was “the first man in the world to make animated films”, but he was likely familiar with the earlier work of American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl.

In 1900, Blackton produced The Enchanted Drawing, a trick filmin which an artist interacts with a drawing on an easel.

Blackton used chalk drawings in 1906 to animate the film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, and used stop motion techniques to animate a scene in the 1907 film The Haunted Hotel. Cohl’s films, such as 1908’s Fantasmagorie, were dreamlike nonnarrative pieces in which characters and scenes continually changed shape. Cohl’s films were first distributed in the United States in 1909, the year McCay said he first became interested in animation. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, McCay combined the interactive qualities of Blackton’s films with the abstract, shapeshifting qualities of Cohl’s into his own films. In the films of all three, the artist interacts with the animation.

Considered McCay’s masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberlanddebuted in October 1905 as a full-page Sunday strip in the New York Herald.

Its child protagonist, whose appearance was based on McCay’s son Robert,^[16] had fabulous dreams that would be interrupted with his awakening in the last panel. McCay experimented with timing and pacing, the form of the comics page, the size and shape of panels, perspective, and architectural and other details.^[17]

The strip has seen a number of other adaptations. An extravagant $100,000 Little Nemo stage show with score by Victor Herbert and lyrics by Harry B. Smith played to sold-out audiences in 1907.

A joint American-Japanese feature-length film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland appeared in 1989, with contributions by Ray Bradbury, Chris Columbus, and Moebius.^[20] Little Nemo: The Dream Master was a 1990 side-scrolling platform video game adaptation of the 1989 film.^[21]

Synopsis

Following credits proclaiming McCay as “The Famous Cartoonist of the New York Herald“^[14] and “the first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move”, McCay sits in a restaurant with a group of colleagues, cartoonist George McManus, actor John Bunny^[13] and publisher Eugene V. Brewster^[23] among them. McCay bets the group that in one month he can make 4000 drawings move. The group laughs and gestures that he is drunk or crazy. McCay sets to work in a studio where he directs workers to move around bundles of paper and barrels of ink. A month later, McCay gathers his colleagues in front of a film projector. McCay rapidly sketches characters from the cast of his Little Nemo comic strip.^[24]

Little Nemo (1911) McCay places a drawing of the character Flip in a wooden slot in front of the camera. The words “Watch me move” appear above Flip’s head, and he begins to make gestures while smoking his cigar.

Blocks fall from the sky and assemble themselves into the character Impie, and the pair’s figures distort, disappear, and reappear before a fantastically-dressed Little Nemo magically materializes. Nemo prevents the two others from fighting and takes control of their forms—he stretches and squashes them with the raising and lowering of his arms. Nemo then draws the Princess and brings her to animated life. He gives her a rose which has suddenly grown nearby, just as a gigantic dragon appears. The pair seat themselves on a throne in the dragon’s mouth^[26] and wave to the audience as the dragon carries them away.

Flip and Impie attempt to follow the dragon in a jalopy, but the car explodes and sends them into the air.

Doctor Pill arrives to help, but cannot find anyone until Flip and Impie land on him. The pair try to help the doctor to his feet when the animation freezes. The camera zooms out to reveal the serial number “No. 4000”, and a thumb holding the drawing.^[26]

By late 1910, McCay had made the 4000 rice-paper drawings for the animated portion of the film. Each was assigned a serial number, and marks were made in the top corners for registration.

They were mounted on sheets of cardboard to make them easier to handle and photograph. Before he had them photographed, he tested them on a hand-cranked 24 by 12 by 20 in (61 by 30 by 51 cm) Mutoscope-like machine to ensure the animation was fluid. Photography was done at the Vitagraph Studiosunder the supervision of Blackton. The animated portion took up about four minutes of the film’s total length. In only one sequence did McCay use an animation loop for a repeated action: he re-used a series of seven drawings six times (three forward, three back) to have Flip move his cigar up and down in his mouth three times. McCay made more extensive use of this technique in his later films.

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