Animation, much like any genre of cinema, has its fair share of evolution over the decade. We still have multiple styles of animation, from hand-drawing to stop motion, claymation and of course CGI, but even with the styles we have, almost all of them have to rely on computers or machines one way or the other. Whether it's for budget reasons, or it's the style they choose, or because of a certain scene or special effect they want to have and CGI would be much easier and cheaper to do, but way back in the early ages of animation, animation was probably the most hardest and time consuming project anyone would ever work on. Now that's not to say animation is not time consuming and hard anymore or that movies themselves are not that hard or time consuming in general, but think about, what do you think takes more longer to make, a live action movie with real people and sets that could take you about a year or months or even weeks to complete, depending on how long your movie is, or a movie where you have to constantly keep drawing and drawing but also make those drawings move and put them onto the camera, with no computer? You see when it comes to making an animated film, not only to have to have the skills at drawing or the passion to draw, but you also have to have lots of patience to make an animated film, whether they're shorts or a feature length movie.

So far with the films that were animated most them relied on some sort of trick to them, whether it was putting them in a mirror and spinning them around or just using stop motion as that was how most things that were animated was done at the time. But then one person noticed that his son was playing with a flip book and that flip book gave that person an idea on how to put hand draw animation onto the big screen. That person was none other than Winsor McCay.

Born into Michigan, McCay started his love of drawing when he was just a small boy and he was drawing an aftermath of one of the many fires that hit Spring Lake and he continue is love of drawing ever since. He would draw anything that he saw even drawing something by memory including drawing something he's never seen before.

He later took a job as a reporter-artist for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune. At the time, newspapers did not have the technology yet to reproduce real photographs. So the artist had to retrace or recreate a certain city, place, or a person that was mentioned in the newspaper and it had to be accurate and McCay was the perfect choice for the job.

Later McCay moved to New York with his family and he was employed by James Gordon Bennett Jr. to work for the New York Herald newspaper, from there he took advantage of the newspapers newest and popular sections of the paper, the comic strip sections. His first big comic strip success was Little Sammy Sneeze published on July 24, 1904. It's about a little boy name Sammy whose sneeze are so powerful that almost everything either moves or shakes when he sneezes. The comic strip was popular, but didn't last too long, but it did spawn a few more spin off comic strips, two of which were McCay's longest living comic strips. One was Dream of the Rarebit Fiend published on September 10, 1904, which is just a comic about people eating a dish known as a Welsh rarebit, which is just melted cheese with other ingredients over slices of toasted bread, then they go to bed and start having nightmares and then the surreal thing will happen to them, whether it's them getting buried alive or something is happening to someone close to them and then the comics usually end with the person waking up, regretting that they've eaten the Rarebit. This comic series is often referred to as McCay's most surreal comics in all of his works before and after this and it's also consider a comic series that's made for more mature audience because of it's suggest themes and stories in some of these dreams. McCay continued the dream style of his comics, with his next biggest and longest running comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, published on October 15, 1905. The comic series, involves a little boy name Nemo who goes into a dream like land called Slumberland and would find himself in certain situations and would often end up waking up at the end of every last panel.

These comics were a lot more kid friendly than the Rarebit comics, and they also became very popular overtime. Little Nemo was also the first subject, McCay used for both his vaudeville act and animated film. Due to the interest he had when he saw his son, Robert McCay, playing with a flip book, McCay decided to try his hand at making an animated film using the same sort of technology that was use for the flip book. So he sent out and drew over 4000 pictures on a rice paper using the same type of art style, Art Nouveau, he's been using during is days as a comic strip artist. He put some marks on the top corners of the paper to put them on a registration, then he tested on how fluent his movement on the animations with a Mutoscope-like hand crank machine. The animation segments themselves is about 1 min and 30 seconds long, so McCay made some sort of background story on the animation project, in which he was making a bet with his friends that he could make his drawings move. The animation project was first released in theaters on April 8, 1911, then McCay use the animation film as part of his vaudeville act on April 12 of the same year. It was met with lots of praises and positive reviews from audiences, as this was something that no one as seen before and they were very impress, in fact they were so impressed that when McCay released his next animation project, How a Mosquito Operates the following year, the audiences were convinced that McCay was just using some sort of special effects like wires or that he trace the drawing on some real life pictures of people or existing animals and that's way the drawings looked so realistic. So to proves to the people that he didn't use any sort of wires or tricks in is project, me made a hint to his audiences that his next animated project would be something serious, educational, and it's based on something that you could never find a real life photograph on.

So what did McCay use for his next project, well a dinosaur. Makes sense, when was the last time you saw a real photo of a dinosaur?

The dinosaur he used for this project was a Brontosaurus, as it was one of the earliest dinosaur bones shown in a museum at the time. McCay had already drawn a dinosaur before from his days working for the newspaper comics, but this was the first time he's ever animated one, in fact this is the first ever film to feature a dinosaur. This was McCay's most dedicated project he had ever worked on. He wanted to make sure that this project was perfect to him. There were a lot of first he did with this project, this was the first animated film to have a background and it was the first animated film to have something happening during the background, and because of the backgrounds themselve, the animated film used 10,000 drawings! Now that is dedication to your work.

It was also one the first animated films to have any sort of character. Before this most animated films were just a bunch of drawings doing something you can't do in real life, but with Gertie and McCay's previous animated film the Mosquito one, we now have a drawing having a sense of personally. In the case for Gertie, her character is like a little child or a trained puppy, in which she as her moments of throwing temper tantrums or evening crying after being scolded by McCay. To make sure Gertie would be accurate in her movement, McCay timed his owned breath to help him determine on how Gertie should breathe, but the one thing that made McCay and even the people at the museum stumped was on how an extinct like Gertie would be able to stand up from a lying position. So McCay made a flying creature while Gertie was standing up to distract the audiences for awhile.

Gertie was another big hit for McCay in both his Vaudeville act and in theaters. Audiences and critics went crazy for this short, they loved Gertie and the comedy this film had to offer, but McCay's employer at the New York American, William Hearst didn't like the fact that McCay's animation and his Vaudeville acts were keeping him away from his newspaper job, so McCay had to give his vaudeville acts, but he still made a few more animation films in the early 20s, until he also had to give that up as well, so any another project he had plan out, like a sequel for Gertie, never saw the light of day.

Today McCay is seen at the father of animation and he certainly improve a lot for the field of animations for which they would later inspired and also improved some more with future animators like Max Fleischer and Walt Disney. Most of his works, like so much of the other early films, can be seen on YouTube and also be brought for on DVD.