Little Nemo (1911 film)

Little Nemo, also known as Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, is a 1911 silent animated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. One of the earliest animated films, it was McCays first, and featured characters from McCays comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Its expressive character animation distinguished the film from the experiments of earlier animators.

Inspired by flip books his son Robert brought home, McCay came to see the possibility of making moving pictures of his cartoons. McCay, then in his early forties, claimed he was the first man in the world to make animated films, but he was likely familiar with the earlier work of American James Stuart Blackton and the French mile Cohl. In 1900, Blackton produced The Enchanted Drawing, a trick film in which an artist interacts with a drawing on an easel. Blackton used chalk drawings in 1906 to animate the film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, and used stop motion techniques to animate a scene in the 1907 film The Haunted Hotel. Cohls films, such as 1908s Fantasmagorie, were dreamlike nonnarrative pieces in which characters and scenes continually changed shape. Cohls films were first distributed in the United States in 1909, the year McCay said he first became interested in animation. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, McCay combined the interactive qualities of Blacktons films with the abstract, shapeshifting qualities of Cohls into his own films. In the films of all three, the artist interacts with the animation.Considered McCays masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted in October 1905 as a fullpage Sunday strip the New York Herald. Its child protagonist, whose appearance was based on McCays son Robert, had fabulous dreams that would be interrupted with his awakening in the last panel. McCay experimented with the form of the comics page, timing and pacing, the size and shape of panels, perspective, architectural and other details. ........

Source: Wikipedia