Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release 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 earlier 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 use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators such as 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 and 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-and has been preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 1991. In 1994, Gertie the Dinosaur was voted #6 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.
Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. Its star Gertie does tricks much like a trained elephant. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time; she breathes rhythmically, she shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. McCay imbued her with a personality-while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands. When her master McCay calls her, the frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave. Her whip-wielding master has her do tricks such as raising her foot or bowing on command. When she feels she has been pushed too far, she nips back at her master. She cries when he scolds her, and he placates her with a pumpkin.[i] Throughout the act, prehistoric denizens such as a flying lizard continually distract Gertie. She tosses a mammoth in the lake; when it teases her by spraying her with water, she hurls a boulder at it as it swims away. After she quenches her thirst by draining the lake, McCay has her carry him offstage while he bows to the audience. Gertie was McCay's first piece of animation with detailed backgrounds.[20] Main production began in mid-1913. Working in his spare time,[32] McCay drew thousands of frames of Gertie on 6+1⁄2-by-8+1⁄2-inch (17 cm × 22 cm) sheets of rice paper,[31] a medium good for drawing as it did not absorb ink, and as it was translucent it was ideal for the laborious retracing of backgrounds,[33] a job that fell to art student neighbor John A. Fitzsimmons.[31] The drawings themselves occupied a 6-by-8-inch (15 cm × 20 cm) area of the paper, marked with registration marks in the corners[33] to reduce jittering of the images when filmed. They were photographed mounted on large pieces of stiff cardboard. McCay was concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine the timing of Gertie's breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie's great weight. McCay consulted with New York museum staff to ensure the accuracy of Gertie's movements; the staff were unable to help him find out how an extinct animal would stand up from a lying position, so in a scene in which Gertie stood up, McCay had a flying lizard come on screen to draw away viewers' attention. When the drawings were finished, they were photographed at Vitagraph Studios in early 1914. A black-and-white film still in the four corners. Three men in the center stand by a table on the right stacked with thousands of sheets of paper. McCay was open about the techniques that he developed, and refused to patent his system, reportedly saying, "Any idiot that wants to make a couple of thousand drawings for a hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club."
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Негізгі бет (ANIMATION) Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914
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