Fifty Before '50: GERTIE THE DINOSAUR

 by JB

Before Mickey Mouse... Before Oswald the Lucky Rabbit... Before Krazy Kat... There was Gertie.

In 1913, Winsor McKay was one of the most famous cartoonists in the country, drawing the enormously successful Little Nemo in Slumberland for the Hearst newspaper syndicate. Looking to expand his fame and income, he embarked on a vaudeville tour wherein he did a “chalk talk,” drawing on a large blackboard while engaging the audience with jokes and banter. Soon, he expanded his act with an animated cartoon he drew himself; he would stand next to the screen and interact with a cartoon dinosaur projected there. He named the dinosaur “Gertie.”

McKay’s vaudeville turn became very popular very quickly. He would stand next to the screen, holding a whip like a lion tamer and command Gertie to perform various tasks: raise your right leg, dance, and bow. At the end of the act, McKay would sneak behind the screen and his animated image would appear onscreen, climb up Gertie’s neck, and Gertie would walk offstage with McKay atop her head. Sensational. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

But all of this vaudeville business took McKay away from his day job, and William Randolph Hearst demanded that McKay return to San Francisco and continue drawing his popular daily comic strip. McKay came up with the brilliant idea of filming additional bookend material, so that he would appear on film presenting Gertie, and the entire movie could be sent out “on tour” in his stead.

You can watch McKay’s film here:

NOTE: If you only wish to see Gertie, skip ahead to the seven-minute mark!

This is the film that survives today. Although the bookend material is a little tedious, the cartoon holds up quite well. In making his cartoon, McKay came up with many of the techniques of modern cell animation: using registration pegs to hold the drawings still while being photographed so there would be less jitter, starting with a series of “major poses” and then filling in the cells in between, and using assistants to draw the backgrounds. Because McKay used regular paper instead of clear vinyl acrylic, these assistants needed to tediously redraw the background on each and every cell.

The next year, because Gertie the Dinosaur was such a sensation, scalawag John Randolph Bray filmed and released a plagiarized rip-off. Looking at the two films, it’s really astounding what a bald-faced criminal Bray was. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, Blackhawk Films began selling copies of Bray’s nonsense as the real thing, and so film history got a little scuffed and scuttled for a short time. Eventually, the truth was sorted out. McKay was a trailblazer. Bray was a wannabe.

Here is Bray’s affront to McKay:



Notice that, although you can argue that Bray’s dinosaur drawing is “better,” the animation definitely is not, obviously trying to wring the maximum amount of movement from the minimum number of drawings. I think McKay’s Gertie has much more personality. YouTube commentator CosmicSponge2004 put it best when he dismissed Bray’s film as “unnerving and creepy.”

If Gertie looks somehow... familiar to you, you may be thinking of the life-sized Gertie statue that towers over “Dinosaur Gertie’s Ice Creams of Extinction” at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando. It just makes sense that Disney knows how to honor animation pioneers.

Before Gertie, "animation" consisted of flipbooks and early motion toys like the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope. Cartoons were more like James Stuart Blackton's "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces"—very short, chalk-talk style vignettes. Gertie was the first real animated character with a personality, and audiences loved her. Less than 25 years later, Walt Disney would mark the next great leap forward with Snow White, the first full-length, full color, animated feature—and though there were many steps in between, Snow White couldn't have happened without Gertie.