Best movie ever!

Beautiful, moving film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The Centaurs (1921)This Winsor McCay short is certainly worth watching if you're a fan of his work but sadly it's only available in fragments as some of the footage has been lost over time. What we basically have are some examples of a centaurs family (half human, half horse creatures) as they walk around in the woods. Again, since the film is incomplete it's hard to know exactly what McCay was going for but there's enough footage here to at least get a good idea of what the animation was like. I thought all of the creatures looked extremely good and I thought McCay did a nice job with the style of their bodies and how the human aspect of them were added in. I also thought the background work was pretty impressive and especially early on when we see one of the creatures walking through the woods. With that said, the one thing I thought was lacking was the quality of bringing the creatures to life and making you feel as if they're real. This is something shown in McCay's earlier work but it is missing here.

I saw three versions of this on YouTube (as linked from Google Video). One of them had a heavy metal score that seemed WAY unsuitable. Beautiful images of the forest and the half human-half horse figures that still makes one take his/her breath away some 86 years later. Would be nice to see if any other fragments have survived of this most fascinating film from the father of animation, Winsor McCay. As it is, it's still interesting to watch a young centaur couple try to get the approval of the older one and then have have a young boy who says "thank you" at the end. And thank you, Mr. McCay for all your contributions to the art of animation.

This is a very pretty cartoon to watch, as the centaurs move gracefully and are drawn in a sort of romanticized Art Nouveau-style. It was also interesting and says a lot about the sensibilities of the day that the female centaurs had breasts--not super well-defined ones, but they were indeed topless. This makes sense for a centaur, I know, but is something you never would have seen a few years later! A pretty young female centaur and male centaur meet and fall in love. The mother centaur seems wistful about this but in the end after years have passed, the two lovers come to see grandma and grandpa centaur with their own young centaur and all are happy. Not much of a plot, I admit, but a pretty bit of animation.

Only a small part of this cartoon survive, about a minute and a half of lovely images by the foremost cartoonist of the the early 20th century. Several of Windsor McCay's cartoons are considered classics of the art, such as GERTIE THE DINOSAUR and THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA, but the draftsmanship and execution of these remnants make it, along with the Fleischer Superman cartoons, make it the most beautiful animation in the history of the art.