Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

Directed by

Winsor McCay

Genre

fantasy film, silent film, live-action/animated film

Country

United States

Runtime

12 min

Rated

NR

Rating

6.7 of 10 from 152 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A cartoonist introduces his animated pet dinosaur Gertie who performs tricks for the audience. This early animated short shows a playful dinosaur following orders in a vaudeville style act.

whimsicalinventiveplayfulcharminghistoricinteractivelightheartedbrisk

What happens

Gertie the Dinosaur is an animated short film released in 1914 by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the first animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay initially presented the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie performed tricks at her master's command. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed his vaudeville activities, prompting McCay to add a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release, which was renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), after producing about a minute of footage. Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had previously 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 employ several animation techniques, like keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators, including 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. It 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. In 1991, the U.S. Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Gertie on Tour (1921)
• The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918)
• Brute Force (1914)
• Little Nemo (1911)
• The Police Dog (1914)
• Prehistoric Peeps (1905)
• The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1917)
• Old Doc Yak and the Artist's Dream (1913)