TouchéGet the appIn 1914 a cartoonist walked offstage into his own cartoon
In 1914 Winsor McCay went on stage with a whip and a film of Gertie, a dinosaur he had drawn by hand. She obeyed his orders, most of the time.
On February 8, 1914, at the Palace Theater in Chicago, Winsor McCay walked on stage carrying a whip. He stood to the right of a movie screen and introduced "the only dinosaur in captivity." On the screen, a cartoon dinosaur put her head out of a cave.
Her name was Gertie, and she did tricks like a trained elephant. McCay gave orders, and she lifted a foot or bowed to the audience. When he scolded her, she cried. He tossed a cardboard apple at the screen, turned his back to the audience and slipped it into his pocket. At that moment an apple appeared in the film, and Gertie ate it.
For the finale McCay walked off the stage, and a drawn McCay appeared in the film. Gertie lifted him onto her back and walked away with him while he bowed to the audience.
McCay already drew the comic strip Little Nemo, and Gertie was his third cartoon. The one before it, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), showed a giant mosquito drinking from a sleeping man. It moved so much like the real insect that audiences said he must have traced photographs or used wires. For the next film he chose an animal that nobody could have photographed.
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He worked on Gertie in his spare time from mid-1913, on thousands of sheets of thin paper. The paper was translucent, so the background could be traced onto every sheet. That job went to John Fitzsimmons, an art student who lived next door. McCay timed Gertie's breathing by his own. Museum staff in New York could not tell him how an extinct animal got up from lying down. So in that scene he sent a flying lizard across the screen to draw the audience's eyes away.
The show moved to New York, where McCay's employer was unhappy with it. McCay illustrated editorials for the New York American, and its owner, William Randolph Hearst, did not like the shows cutting into that work. Reviews of the act stopped appearing in his paper. On March 8 Hearst barred his artists from vaudeville, and McCay later signed a contract that kept him from performing outside greater New York.
In November 1914 the producer William Fox offered to put Gertie in movie theaters. McCay shot a live-action opening in which he bets his friends a dinner that he can bring a dinosaur to life. Title cards took over the lines he used to speak on stage.
About 400 of the original drawings survive. In 2018 a team used them to rebuild the stage version, including a lost encore sequence, and performed it live at the Annecy animation festival in France.