Posts Tagged ‘krazy kat’
Little Nemo (The road to Peanuts pt.2)
One of America’s first major comic-strip artists and pioneer of animation, Winsor McCay’s work still stands as one of the finest cartoons in history. His classic strip “Little Nemo In Slumberland” first appeared in the New York Herald on October 15, 1905. The most famous cartoon of it’s day the strip featured Little Nemo, a young child and his wild dream world, filled with animals, stunning palaces, and villians, with him ultimately always being awaken in the last panel in which he would comment on his adventure. McCay employed superb draftsman along with a wonderful sense of storytelling in every Sunday strip. In his foreward to John Canemaker’s biography on McCay, children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak wrote: “My book In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to Winsor McCay.”
In 1914 McCay made animation history with “Gertie the dinosaur”. A short animated film, Gertie’s personality was the inspiration and predecessor for other successful animators like Walt Disney and MAx Fleischer.
What is truly amazing is that McCay had to draw each frame, thousands of them, on 6 x 8 sheets of rice paper, before the concept of the plastic cel animation in which the key characters were paint on celluloid material and overlayed on the painted background. His first animated short is wonderful, my favorite part is when Gertie recalls in a dream, earlier days when she was the life of the party!
There’s a great blog dedicated to Winsor Mcay at: http://springlakemccay.blogspot.com/
and also an excellent wikipedia entry on Little Nemo at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Nemo
To see Mcay’s first animation of gertie the dinosaur, click here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36gqBoUSJ4M
