Winsor McCay re-creating the laborious process he used to produce his Little Nemo cartoon, circa 1911.
Fifteen years earlier, McCay had seen his first movie while working at the dime museum in Cincinnati. That film had been part of Thomas Edison’s Vitascope project, when cinema was still very much a novelty. The premise was simple—just a train moving toward the camera—but it frightened those who had never seen a moving film before. During the showing one man stood up, screaming his head off, while another man fainted and crumpled to the ground. In subsequent years, people became comfortable with seeing photographs move on-screen, but they still had never seen drawings like McCay’s move in a similar way.
On April 12, 1911, McCay showed his animated cartoon at New York’s Colonial Theatre, a vaudeville house that seated nearly 1,300 people. The spectators sat mesmerized, asking each other excitedly if it was all some sort of trick using special photography as they watched characters—Impy, Nemo, and Dr. Flip—float in space, no wires visible, as Nemo appeared out of fragments of stray lines that had coalesced to form him. When the cartoon reached its end, just a few minutes after it started, a green dragon named Bosco lumbered into the frame holding a chair in his mouth to carry all the characters away.
Moving Picture World called the cartoon “an admirable piece of work,” and claimed that it “should be popular everywhere.” What the magazine didn’t know, because animation was still brand-new, was that McCay’s film had set a very high bar. Only people looking back, from many years in the future, could appreciate just how high that bar was. In the 1960s, an animator named Bob Kurtz would call McCay’s work “Seventy or eighty years ahead of its time—as if he had really been born in 2025, acquired a complete knowledge of animation, then took a time capsule back to 1911 and faked it.” In 1985, Chuck Jones, who helped create many of the iconic Warner Bros. cartoon characters, would say, “It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay’s animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to figure out how he did it.”
After finishing his first cartoon, McCay began dreaming of animation’s vast potential and championing it as a new art form. Perhaps it would even replace great styles of art that had come before, he told anyone who would listen. “Take, for instance, that wonderful painting which everyone is familiar with, entitled The Angelus,” he announced to a crowd of fans one day, referring to a popular oil painting by the French master Jean-François Millet, of two peasants standing in a field solemnly praying over a meager harvest of potatoes. “There will be a time when people will gaze at it and ask why the objects remain rigid and stiff. They will demand action. And to meet this demand the artists of that time will look to motion picture people for help and the artists, working hand in hand with science, will evolve a new school of art that will revolutionize the entire field.”
Chapter 2
“Fantasmagorie”
Winsor McCay didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum, and they weren’t the result of a sudden epiphany. For centuries, people had been fascinated with the idea of animation, of making drawings appear to move. McCay’s achievements were just the next breakthrough in a long series.
In prehistoric times, people probably waved flickering torches in front of cave drawings to make them appear to move. By the time of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), shadow puppets—cut from buffalo hide and moved around behind a screen—were a common way to tell popular stories of the day. Centuries later, shadow puppets became popular in Europe as well. By this point, people were using mathematics coupled with new lens technologies to study light and motion. In 1645, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow). In the last chapter, he mentioned a lantern containing a candle and a curved mirror that, if manipulated in the right way, could make cutout shapes appear to move. This wasn’t technically animation, but it was exciting—so exciting, in fact, that some called it witchcraft. Kircher, who had always wanted to be a missionary and didn’t appreciate the witchcraft accusations, reassured everyone by using his device to show Bible scenes. Once everyone was calmed down, the path was then clear for other entrepreneurs to use Kircher’s techniques for something more important: making money.
A Dutchman named Pieter van Musschenbroek quickly improved upon Kircher’s lantern by fitting it with a disc containing sequential images that, when turned, made the images appear to move in a more sophisticated manner. Then, a Frenchman, Abbé Guyot, compiled this and the growing number of other animation techniques in his book Rational Recreations in Which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated, by a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments. Insofar as lantern showmen could remember the title, this was the book they couldn’t stop talking about. “Magical theater” shows took off like a dance craze.
One lantern showman stood out from all the others, a Frenchman named Étienne-Gaspard Robert of Liège. In the 1790s he developed a spooky show, “Fantasmagorie,” which quickly grew famous. By 1794, at the height of the French Revolution, his crowds were so big that he had to move his show to the ruins of a large old monastery in Paris. Audiences filed into the darkened crypts, dim candlelight reflecting off piles of neatly stacked bones, to gaze at flickering portraits of fallen heroes from the recent fighting. A grand finale featured the Grim Reaper floating through the air, reminding everyone of “the fate that awaits us all.”
In 1824, Peter Mark Roget, who would later become famous for his thesaurus, published The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects. It described how the human eye will blend a series of sequential images into motion if the images are shown fast enough. Two years later, John Ayrton Paris built on this idea by inventing a toy called a “thaumatrope,” consisting of a string threaded through a disc with a different image on each side—say a bird on one side and a cage on the other. When spun, the images seemed to combine, making it appear that, in this example, the bird was in the cage. A dispute then arose over who invented the thaumatrope—the contenders included Paris himself, Charles Babbage, Dr. William Fitton, Sir John Herschel, and Dr. William Wollaston—but the argument faded as thaumatropes were replaced by Fantoscopes. These featured a greater number of discs and shutterlike slits allowing for more sophisticated movement.
In 1834, the Englishman William Horner invented what he called the “daedalum,” or Wheel of the Devil, which didn’t become popular until the 1860s, after it was renamed the “zoetrope,” or Wheel of Life, which sounded more pleasant. The zoetrope was a hollow drum with slits on the sides where paper was fed in. Images were printed on the paper, and when the drum was turned, the images appeared to move.
By 1868, flipbooks were popular. These contained sequential images that appeared to move when the pages were flipped quickly. They were given as gifts and promotions, like one that was entitled “Turkish Trophies” and given out with cigarettes; the cover billed it as an instruction manual for deep-breathing exercises, but the naughty images inside showed pornography instead.
In 1877, the Frenchman Charles-Émile Reynaud invented the praxinoscope, a device similar to the zoetrope except that it used mirrors instead of slits on the side of a moving drum. In practice, it worked much like the old lantern shows. Reynaud called his lantern plays pantomimes lumineuses and enjoyed subject matter depicting the wild and surreal, such as one show portraying a black boy juggling his own head. These shows were quite popular, seen by an estimated 500,000 people between 1892 and 1900.
The praxinoscope was an early technology used to animate images.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, many artists were experimenting with new cameras that recorded motion. Thomas Edison was experimenting with what he called a “mutoscope,”