The Worst Film Ever

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

I will always remember Winsor McCay as the creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland, one of the most beautiful comic strips ever made. McCay was an amazing artist who loved playing with technique; his 'Nemo' strip displayed his boundless imagination in terms of perspective, panel layout, colors, architectural detail, movement and size. He was arguably the greatest comics artist that ever lived, even better than Will Eisner and Jack Kirby.Gertie the Dinossaur is renowned for being one of the earliest animated movies. But I don't think it comes close to reaching the beauty of one 'Nemo' strip. The movie is about a host interacting with a dinosaur, prompting it to perform tricks to amuse the audience. The drawings aren't spectacular and the tricks aren't imaginative; what Gertie does could mostly be done by a pet dog. Historically it may have a lot of value, but it did nothing for me in terms of entertainment.

One of the earliest and certainly most important of animated cartoons is Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. Surrounded by a live action recreation of McCay with fellow cartoonist George McManus (Bringing Up Father) making a bet of making a dinosaur come to life, the animated footage can still charm any animation buff with scenes of Gertie lifting a foot, crying, throwing Jumbo the elephant to the water, eating a tree, drinking the water, or carrying McCay himself out of frame. The cartoonist drew about a thousand feet of cartoons in six months without cels or backgrounds to put cels over. Just entire drawings with slight differences on sheets of paper. Certainly worth seeing for anyone who wants to study animation from the beginning.

Winsor McCay did a great many things of which he could be justifiably proud, but I think Gertie the Dinosaur ranks at the top of that lengthy list of accomplishments and I suspect McCay may have felt the same way, for it is still remarkable all these years later. Gertie is more life-like than some people I know! Funny, believable, touching and fascinating, sometimes all at once. This is one of the cornerstones of modern animation and also succeeds on its own terms and merits as both art and entertainment. Winsor McCay grew unhappy and somewhat disgruntled and disillusioned as animation became, in his eyes, more commercial and less artistically inclined. I've often wondered what McCay would have made of the independents, such as Will Vinton and Bill Plympton, among others, and the different forms, like Claymation and the stop-motion work of George Pal and others. I hope he would be pleased with at least some of the work done in the last 90 or so years. An absolute gem. If you haven't seen Gertie, I envy you for the treat you have in store. She's a delight. Well worth getting. Most highly recommended.

Winsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur", is an early animation masterpiece that I believe can be enjoyed by both extreme animation buffs, and the average casual viewer. On different levels of course. The average viewer would see a pleasant little film about a baby like dinosaur showing off for us. An animation fanatic like me would see a lot more. For the time it was made, the animation is fantastic. It's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I have seen from that time. The detail is sharp, the movements are smooth, and the backgrounds, all hand drawn frame by frame, are vivid and hardly shake at all. I overheard someone mentioning during the class break that he could see an early use of rotoscoping when "McCay" walks onto the screen. The guy was mistaken. Rotoscoping wasn't invented until the 1930's. This is a testament to McCay's artistry: to make characters so life-like that people still think today that they are real.That previous statement was in reference to McCay's realistic drawing style. However, it could also be applied to the character of Gertie. She is very believable as a real "person." We come to like Gertie and her child-like antics, understanding her needs to be the focus of attention. I liked the way Gertie tried to hog the screen from Jumbo, first by throwing him into the lake, then by hurtling a rock at him. This of course shows us Gertie's infantile character, but, going back to the artwork, is also a perfect example of McKay's mastery of smooth animated movement. All said, this is probably one of the key films in the transition from cartoon characters just being moving drawings to being characters that we can understand and care about.