winsor mccay: the sinking of the lusitania
Posted by dermot on December 19, 2008 at 10:38 am
I must confess to a lack of enthusiasm for the Disney style of animation. It seems utterly conservative - a morass of visual cliches and tricks. Once you’re trained in it, it’s very difficult to escape though. There are animators who worked in the years BW (Before Walt). Surely the greatest is Winsor McCay, who, in 1918, animated “The Sinking of the Lusitania” - the first animated film to use cels.
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) marks McCays path away from radicalism in many ways. Lusitania was the next film after Gertie, and there weren’t any others in that four year period because William Randolph Hearst at The American was restricting McCay from producing animation, performing on vaudeville, and creating comics. Hearst was focusing McCay on creating editorial cartoons. This greatly depressed McCay, as he was not able to animate or perform, his true love. So when the opportunity to create an animated film arose, he jumped on it. He was commissioned to produce an animated version of the sinking of the ship “The Lusitania”. McCay produced this somber animation using cels for the first time. His drawings were more realistic because of their detail and the use of washes and shading. This created a more documentary feel, which he furthered by using cinematic camera angles, which also enhanced the drama of the animation. This film is much different from his previous work, but in many ways quite similar as well. Lusitania still focuses on an event which no one actually saw (thus making the event “fantastic”) and McCay pushes the boundaries of animation in the film by employing cinematic camera angles, realistic drawings, and cels.
The radical changes McCay presented to animation revolutionized the field to such a great magnitude that McCay himself was not able to handle it. After Lusitania, McCay fell away from the spotlight, producing smaller more conservative animations. At a dinner in his honor McCay addressed fellow animators; he concluded his speech with “Animation should be art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad Luck!”
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