Winsor McCay was one of the greatest cartoonists of the twentieth century. His page layouts were a marvel of design, his line work was sublime, his stories and dialogue subtly bizarre in their whimsy. He was also one of the first animators. In this short film, he emphasizes everything that I love about animation: its nature as something explicitly created in each still image and yet brimming with life in the motion of the whole; and the plasticity that is allowed by this duality, as the created images of physical forms seem to create their own physics through their movement.
One thing I love about McCay’s artwork is that he combines a perfect sense of three-dimensional form with thick, constant-weight lines. The linework emphasizes the drawn nature of the images, purposely avoiding naturalism, and yet it creates the sense of a real physical form. It seems almost distinct from the outlined form, hovering around it as an indicator of its creation. In the case of the comic strips, this aspect of the art helps to achieve a dreamlike unreality; but in the case of the film, it emphasizes the aforementioned duality, allowing us to always see the moving images as the work of a drawing hand, and then marveling at the life they take on, the way they move beyond the confines of creation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSp2ej2S00
And here’s an image from McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland:
