Little Nemo
About Little Nemo
In a restaurant, Winsor McCay bets fellow cartoonists that he can make four thousand drawings move inside a month. They laugh. A month later he sits them in front of a projector. On screen he sketches Flip, who gestures and smokes. Blocks pile into Impie. The figures stretch, squash, and reform. Nemo appears, draws the Princess, and hands her a rose. A dragon arrives and the pair ride in its mouth. Flip and Impie chase them in a jalopy that blows up. Doctor Pill shows up, and the animation stops on drawing number 4,000. McCay has won the bet.
Cast & crew
More about Little Nemo
McCay drew about 4,000 images on rice paper, mounted them on numbered cards with registration marks, and tested them on a hand-cranked Mutoscope-style machine. James Stuart Blackton supervised the photography at Vitagraph. The short opened in theaters on April 8, 1911. Four days later McCay put it into his vaudeville act and afterward had the animated frames hand-colored.
Themes
Background
Flip books his son brought home pushed McCay from the Herald comic page toward a projector. By 1911 Vitagraph was willing to photograph the stack.
In film history
The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2009.
Making
The bet in the restaurant is staged, but the labor was real: thousands of rice-paper drawings, each lined up by hand before Blackton's camera.
Reviews
The Moving Picture World praised the short. In 1938 the architect Claude Bragdon wrote that watching it he had seen the birth of a new art.
Audiences
The vaudeville booking, starting April 12, 1911, kept the film in McCay's act, and the Morning Telegraph rated that act at the top of its list.
Look
Blackton's Vitagraph camera photographed the cards. The animated passage is a locked frame of drawings replacing one another. The restaurant scenes are ordinary live action.
Technique
Registration marks on the cardboard mounts keep Flip, Nemo, and the dragon from jittering as the drawings change.
Preservation
Prints survive, including a hand-colored version of the animated section. In 2009 the Library of Congress placed the film on the National Film Registry.
Notes
- The live-action table includes George McManus, John Bunny, and Maurice Costello.
- The Moving Picture World called the film an admirable piece of work.
- The Morning Telegraph put McCay's film act on its Blue List of top vaudeville turns.
- McCay said he was first to make animated films. Blackton and Émile Cohl had already done it.
- He followed it with How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).
- A surviving copy runs about 11 minutes 33 seconds. Most of that is the live-action bet. The cartoons last about four minutes.
Scenes
- McCay sketches Flip, and the drawing starts to smoke.
- Nemo and the Princess ride in the dragon's mouth.
- The reel freezes on drawing number 4,000.
Influenced by
- McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland
Influenced
- How a Mosquito Operates (1912)
- Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)
