Winsor McCay and the Birth of Animation

Despite his claims to the contrary, Winsor McCay did not invent the animated cartoon. But the legendary cartoonist did play a pioneering role, helping to advance, shape and define the nascent art form.

This Saturday Pacific Film Archive will present several films by McCay as part of a presentation by another accomplished cartoonist, John Canemaker.

Canemaker has many achievements to his credit, the latest among them being the Academy Award he won last year for his short film The Moon and the Son. The film depicted an imaginary conversation between Canemaker and his deceased father and featured the voices of John Turturro and Eli Wallach.

Canemaker will be present for a screening of his own films as part of a program entitled “John Canemaker: Marching to a Different Toon” at 5 p.m. Saturday and will follow at 7:30 p.m. with a presentation and discussion of the McCay films.

The presentation on McCay is based on Canemaker’s own biography of the great cartoonist, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. The book was first published in 1987 but has been newly revised and expanded in a beautiful new edition that presents excellent reproductions of McCay’s artwork along with insightful and scholarly analysis. It is the only comprehensive biography of McCay and will surely play a crucial role in helping to better establish his legacy in print and animated cartooning.

McCay’s range and talent is difficult to comprehend today. He was an extremely prolific artist, creating a number of popular comic strips as well as illustrations, editorial cartoons and animated cartoons, working on many of them simultaneously. The work for which he is most renowned focused on dreams and fantasy and included his most famous and beloved creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, widely considered one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Another of his unique, though lesser known, strips is Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Like Nemo, it relies on a predictable pattern in the creation of a most unpredictable strip. Each week the strip depicted a harrowing nightmare consisting of often surreal and hallucinatory imagery, and each week the strip concluded in precisely the same way: The protagonist would wake up in bed, realize it was just a dream, and exclaim that never again would he eat so much rarebit for dinner.

McCay used the same basic structure for Little Nemo, with the young boy always waking up or falling out of bed in the strip’s final panel, a device later used to great effect by another comic strip artist, Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes often featured the wild adventures that take place inside the mind of a highly imaginative 6-year-old boy.

Little Nemo in Slumberland ran as a full page every Sunday at a time when a newspaper page was nearly twice the size of today’s broadsheet pages. The comic strip was a relatively new medium when Nemo debuted in 1905, just 10 years old and still struggling to find its niche. McCay’s superior draftsmanship, wide-ranging imagination and bold use of color took the form to new heights.

Brilliant as his imagination and artwork were, McCay was not without his shortcomings. He never seemed to master dialogue or narrative thrust. His dialogue is trite and redundant, and often crammed into awkward and at times barely legible word balloons. Of course, the word balloon itself was a recent invention, and it took time for artists to learn to incorporate them gracefully into their compositions. But McCay never seemed to fully grasp the concept; in fact, Nemo, even in its second incarnation in the 1920s, still evinced this anomalous flaw.

McCay later turned his attention to animation, and once again, he played a major role in the development of a new art form, using his bold imagination, unparalleled drawing skills and showman’s flair in advancing the new medium. McCay employed wonderfully sophisticated effects and charming characters in his animated work, even taking his films on the road in vaudeville.

“Where McCay differed from his predecessors,” Canemaker writes, “was in his ability to animate his drawings with no sacrifice of linear detail; the fluid motion, naturalistic timing, feeling of weight, and, eventually, the attempts to inject individualistic personality traits into his characters were new qualities that McCay first brought to the animated film medium.”

McCay developed techniques that would later become commonplace and, in stark contrast to other, more secretive artists of the day, refused to patent those techniques, believing that the art form stood a better chance of progressing if artists shared their knowledge.

Saturday’s screening will include four of McCay’s 10 animated films. His first film was Little Nemo, in which Nemo, Flip and the Imp go through a series of fun-house mirror style transformations. At the time, audiences were skeptical and often didn’t believe that the film was hand-drawn.

“It was pronounced very lifelike,” McCay wrote in a 1927 essay, “but my audience declared that it was not a drawing, but that the pictures were photographs of real children.”

So, in his next film, McCay drew something a little more difficult. How a Mosquito Operates, a somewhat twisted presentation that would fit right in today in Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival, features a disturbingly oversized mosquito plunging his proboscis again and again into the face of a sleeping man, eventually becoming so bloated with blood that he explodes. Again, the cartoonist encountered skepticism.

“My audiences were pleased,” McCay wrote, “but declared the mosquito was operated by wires to get the effect before the camera.”

So McCay decided to create a character that could not be photographed: Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie was a popular creation and McCay proceeded to take her on the road in vaudeville with a clever act that consisted of McCay standing beside the screen and commanding Gertie as though she were a trained elephant. He would toss her a pumpkin, crack a trainer’s whip, and even step into the frame himself, disappearing behind the screen and reappearing onscreen as an animated figure riding on the dinosaur’s back, a moment later satirized by Buster Keaton in his first feature film, The Three Ages.

McCay’s next project was his most ambitious. The Sinking of the Lusitania took two years to produce and consisted of nearly 25,000 drawings. It marked the first time McCay used the technique of drawing on transparent cels on separate backgrounds, a technique that not only saved time and work, but also contributed greatly to the film’s dynamics. For the first time, McCay’s animated work took on a more cinematic quality, using dramatic angles to further enhance the action.

Great as his films are and important as his contribution may be, McCay’s defects again hindered his progress. Animated cartoons would soon develop plot and narrative, and, eventually, sound, but without McCay’s help. He played a significant role in nurturing animated film into its adolescence, but it would take other talents to bring it to maturity.

Mr. Arkadin: Orson Welles' Unfinished Puzzle

Criterion's three-disc set of Orson Welles’ long-neglected 1955 film Mr. Arkadin contains a wealth of material documenting the film’s murky history. Just as Criterion gave the deluxe treatment last year to Welles’ 1972 F For Fake, so this year the company has produced a respectful and informative package for Arkadin that does well to salvage the mystery and reputation of this confounding movie. 

The line on Mr. Arkadin is that it is essentially a surrealist version of Citizen Kane, taking the earlier film’s plot and form and elevating every aspect to absurdist heights. Arkadin follows the pattern of Kane by sending a young man off in search of the mysteries of an older man’s life. However, in the case of Mr. Arkadin, the older man is still alive, has in fact commissioned the search, and kills off each witness the younger man uncovers in an attempt to erase his unsavory past, with the goal of protecting his daughter from the disturbing truth behind the family’s wealth. It’s a good enough plot for a pulp movie, but Welles tried to elevate it to something more meaningful and significant, as well as baroque, and that didn’t sit too well with the film’s producer, or its distributors. Eventually, as with so many other Welles projects, the film was taken out of his hands before he could finish it. The result is a film often regarded as his poorest effort. 

Mr. Arkadin has its roots in a weekly English radio show Welles starred in called The Lives of Harry Lime, a series exploiting the character he made famous in the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man. In the early 1950s, Welles was working on his screen version of Othello, traipsing all over Europe on a dwindling budget, desperately trying to raise cash to finance the film. An English producer proposed the radio series and Welles seized the opportunity to make some easy money, cranking out these slight entertainments for a year while he continued to make Othello. 

The script for Mr. Arkadin grew from three of these radio shows, and the Criterion DVD includes all of them, providing a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of the film. 

There are any number of published critiques comparing Kane and Arkadin, some merely tracking the similarities between the two, others taking a psychoanalytical approach, positing that Welles himself was burdened by his earlier greatness and was seeking to somehow negate it through the latter film’s perverse fantasy. However, an often overlooked aspect of Arkadin is that it provides something of a blueprint for Welles’ later works, as many of its scenes, and even individual shots prefigure those of Touch of Evil (1958), the would-be B movie that Welles transformed into a noir masterpiece, and The Trial (1962), Welles’ feverish adaptation of Franz Kafka’s nightmarish novel. 

All of these films reflect Welles’ favored themes: power, regret, betrayal among men, and a strong hint of nostalgia. But what’s interesting about Arkadin is that it uses devices and shots that are replicated almost exactly in Welles’ later films. It’s as if he was so disappointed in the failure of Arkadin that he couldn’t bear to abandon some of its finer moments. 

All three films feature Akim Tamiroff in key roles, usually as a sort of clownish character to be abused by Welles’ tyrants. Toward the end of Arkadin, there is a scene in which Welles looms over Tamiroff as Tamiroff lies on a bed, the wrought-iron bedframe decorating the edge of the image. A few years later, Welles, backed this time with Hollywood money, would stage a similar scene much more elaborately in Touch of Evil, with gaudy flashing neon lights illuminating Welles’ Hank Quinlan as he stalks Tamiroff’s Uncle Joe Grande around a hotel room, strangling him and leaving him to wilt over a similarly ornate bedframe. 

Also in Arkadin, Tamiroff, in another hotel room, at one point moves toward a high window, stepping on a chair as though he is about to escape. Again, in Touch of Evil, Tamiroff, in an effort to escape the murderous Quinlan, climbs toward a high window and shatters it in an escape attempt before Welles pulls him back down. 

One more parallel is in each film’s closing scenes. In Mr. Arkadin, Paola Mori, Arkadin’s daughter, offers a stoic and ambiguous epitaph for her deceased father: “He was capable of anything.” The line is uttered almost without inflection—a frequent problem with Mori’s acting, but in this case the tone is intentional. Likewise, Touch of Evil closes with another exotic beauty—this time Marlene Dietrich—eulogizing the fallen Captain Hank Quinlan with another terse remark: “He was some kind of man.” These closing lines are almost Hemingwayesque in their simplicity, providing stark, dry conclusions to otherwise elaborate melodramas. 

Other aspects of Arkadin show up in The Trial, another of Welles’ independent European productions. The film again features Tamiroff in a key role and is edited to resemble a nightmare, with canted camera angles and disorienting cuts from one off-kilter shot to another. Welles had been something of a pioneer in independent filmmaking, demonstrating with his Macbeth that film could be a living, breathing organism, that it didn’t require the polished sheen of Hollywood. He sought to prove that film could be more free-flowing, deviating from scripts and indulging whimsical tangents with improvised shots and dialogue. Usually his experiments paid off. In the case of Mr. Arkadin, they didn’t. 

Welles never finished editing the film before its producer took it out of its hands. It was released in a compromised form, Welles’ elaborate flashback structure having been replaced by a chronological re-ordering of the scenes. The Criterion release presents three versions: the re-edited European version, an even more heavily re-edited American version (re-titled Confidential Report), and a brand new version in which historians and researchers have attempted to restore Welles’ original editing pattern, reconfiguring the picture to reflect, as best as can be determined, what Welles had originally intended. The result is a more coherent and artistic film than heretofore suspected. 

Mr. Arkadin may still be a failure but few directors fail as spectacularly as Orson Welles. The Criterion edition provides beautifully restored prints that showcase its photography, as well as a host of extra features that help to provide a clear picture of just what exactly Welles was striving for with this film and how and why he failed. 

Mr. Arkadin (1955). $49.95. 105 minutes. Criterion. www.criterionco.com.