Windsor McCay: The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918)

[Dennis Donovan]

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The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) was a ground-breaking piece of animation. Creator Winsor McCay said it took him eight weeks of work to produce eight second of animation
Video in tweet below

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McCay and his assistants spent almost two years working on The Sinking of the Lusitania, reportedly producing more than 25,000 drawings

12:33 PM · Dec 31, 2024

Here's the entire animation:

Link to tweet

https://bsky.app/profile/silentmoviegifs.bsky.social/post/3lemlaomucs2r

[cyclonefence]

1. Holy mackeral

Winsor McCay, who is the father of American animation--he made "Gertie the Dinosaur"--and the "Little Nemo" comic strip! Thanks so much for posting this.

from Wikipedia, in case anybody is unfamiliar with his work:

McCay was an early animation pioneer; between 1911 and 1921 he self-financed and animated ten films, some of which survive only as fragments. The first three served in his vaudeville act; Gertie the Dinosaur was an interactive routine in which McCay appeared to give orders to a trained dinosaur. McCay and his assistants worked for twenty-two months on his most ambitious film, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), a patriotic recreation of the German torpedoing in 1915 of the RMS Lusitania. Lusitania did not enjoy as much commercial success as the earlier films, and McCay's later movies attracted little attention. His animation, vaudeville, and comic strip work was gradually curtailed as newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, his employer since 1911, expected McCay to devote his energies to editorial illustrations.

In his drawing, McCay made bold, prodigious use of linear perspective, particularly in detailed architecture and cityscapes. He textured his editorial cartoons with copious fine hatching, and made color a central element in Little Nemo. His comic strip work has influenced generations of cartoonists and illustrators. The technical level of McCay's animation—its naturalism, smoothness, and scale—was unmatched until the work of Fleischer Studios in the late 1920s, followed by Walt Disney's feature films in the 1930s. He pioneered inbetweening, the use of registration marks, cycling, and other animation techniques that were to become standard.

[bif]

2. "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend"

A personal favorite of mine. I discovered him many years ago. The man was quite a genius.