110 Years Ago, The First Animated Dinosaur Transformed Movies Forever
The original cinematic sauropod also broke the fourth wall in ways that still seem revolutionary over a century later.
Before Jurassic Park, before King Kong, there was Gertie. In February 1914, a few months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand touched off World War I, cartoonist Winsor McCay thrilled audiences with the most amazing special effect they had ever seen.
McCay climbed onto the stage at the Palace Theater in Chicago, bullwhip in hand. Projected on a screen behind him was a simple line drawing of a sparse landscape. Then McCay called out to his pet, Gertie, and a towering animated Diplodocus longus peeked out from behind a pile of rocks.
She loped toward the camera, pausing to swallow a boulder and uproot a tree. Gertie towered over her creator.
For audiences still coming to grips with moving pictures, it was astonishing. Already famous for his surreal, exquisitely illustrated comic strips like Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland, McCay had slaved for years drawing thousands of frames of Gertie. Most early experiments in animation had been flat, simplistic and herky-jerky; the smooth movement and dimensionality of this cartoon monster was revelatory.
Gertie moved as if she actually had a muscle system under her skin. Her torso expanded and contracted as if she was really breathing. When she drank a river dry, her belly became distended. When she tossed a mastodon over her shoulder, it receded into the distance realistically. The creature was fanciful, but every detail of anatomy and perspective felt authentic.
Gertie was also the first toon to have a personality; every subsequent animated character from Mickey Mouse to Gollum is in her debt. But what was truly revolutionary about the character was the way McCay appeared to interact with her. McCay built his own live participation into the short cartoon, and he stood on-stage alongside the projected image like a ringmaster at a circus, appearing to direct the onscreen actions.
When McCay commanded the dinosaur to bow, she bowed; when he later scolded her for not obeying, she burst into tears. Then, at the end of the film, McCay would walk towards the giant screen that his artwork was being projected onto and disappear, just as an animated version of himself suddenly appeared within the film. The cartoon version of McCay is then hoisted 30 feet into the air by his pet. The barrier between the real and onscreen worlds had been breached.
Here’s a recording of recent showing of Gertie, with someone playing the McCay role as the animation unfolds. Listen closely and you can hear that the even though Gertie is just a series of monochromatic line-drawn images, the act is convincing enough to fool a younger audience member.
A version of this article previously appeared in Wired Magazine.