McCay’s superb draftsmanship, fluid sense of movement, and great feeling for character gave viewers an animated creature who seemed to have a personality, a presence, and a life of her own. McCay created a hand-coloured short film of Little Nemo for use during his vaudeville act in 1911, but it was Gertie the Dinosaur, created for McCay’s 1914 tour, that transformed the art. The one great exception among these early illustrators-turned-animators was Winsor McCay, whose elegant, surreal Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend remain pinnacles of comic-strip art. ![]() Take a look at a video clip from Winsor McCay's “Gertie on Tour” See all videos for this article Coinciding with the rise in popularity of the Sunday comic sections of the new tabloid newspapers, the nascent animation industry recruited the talents of many of the best-known artists, including Rube Goldberg, Bud Fisher (creator of Mutt and Jeff) and George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat), but most soon tired of the fatiguing animation process and left the actual production work to others. In France, Émile Cohl was developing a form of animation similar to Blackton’s, though Cohl used relatively crude stick figures rather than Blackton’s ambitious newspaper-style cartoons. Later that year, Blackton also experimented with the stop-motion technique-in which objects are photographed, then repositioned and photographed again-for his short film Haunted Hotel. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906 launched a successful series of animated films for New York’s pioneering Vitagraph Company. Although “firsts” of any kind are never easy to establish, the first film-based animator appears to be J. With the invention of sprocket-driven film stock, animation was poised for a great leap forward. Stuart Blackton's animated movie “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” See all videos for this article Reynaud became not only animation’s first entrepreneur but, with his gorgeously hand-painted ribbons of celluloid conveyed by a system of mirrors to a theatre screen, the first artist to give personality and warmth to his animated characters. The Frenchman Émile Reynaud in 1876 adapted the principle into a form that could be projected before a theatrical audience. In 1834 William George Horner invented the zoetrope, a rotating drum lined by a band of pictures that could be changed. One of the first commercially successful devices, invented by the Belgian Joseph Plateau in 1832, was the phenakistoscope, a spinning cardboard disk that created the illusion of movement when viewed in a mirror. If drawings of the stages of an action were shown in fast succession, the human eye would perceive them as a continuous movement. Early experimenters, working to create conversation pieces for Victorian parlours or new sensations for the touring magic-lantern shows, which were a popular form of entertainment, discovered the principle of persistence of vision. The theory of the animated cartoon preceded the invention of the cinema by half a century.
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