I was born thirty-some years too late too late to see the originals. They must have been amazing. There was nothing quite like them before or since. They often filled an entire page of newspaper.
They were animated, engaging, beautiful. They were cartoons that wanted to be movies. They wanted to burst through the confines of two-dimensional print into full three-dimensional motion.
They were the work of Winsor McCay, a man of prodigious output. There is no certain count of everything he produced. He was cartoonist, animator, and inventor of animation devices still used today. He influenced later animators from Walt Disney to Chuck Jones.
His ideas pushed the possibilities of animation to new heights. There were other important pioneering animators, but McCay stands apart from all the others because of the sheer beauty and imagination of his art.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York displays Winsor McCay along with the other great artists of Western Civilization.
His Masterwork was Little Nemo in Slumberland. The cartoon ran in Hearst’s New York Herald for only a few years. It is now timeless. Few cartoons become Art.
This one did.
The sprawling action of the strip begins and ends with Little Nemo, who was modeled after McCay’s son, Robert.
The story starts when Little Nemo falls asleep. It ends when he wakes. His dreams are fantastic adventures that range wildly across time and space. It’s an endlessly flexible format that allows for astonishing flights of fancy.
Stories that might be bizarre, grotesque, or otherwise alarming are made comfortably safe by the presence of Little Nemo at beginning and end. After all, it was only
a dream.
That makes the series charming. Winsor McCay’s artistry makes it Art.
It is the beauty of Little Nemo in Slumberland that first attracted me.
Beauty remains the most important part.
McCay’s “cartoon” doesn’t unfold in static frames that march in orderly rows. The frames expand and contract in artful ways. They don’t contain action, they create action. They move the eye to where McCay wants the eye to move.
Each strip is composed like a painting. The strip can be viewed as sequential panels as you might examine the details of a painting, or, if you step back it can be viewed as a single work of art, complete, balanced, and charmingly composed.
McCay’s drawings in his other works is equally impressive. So is his imagination. It is only in Little Nemo in Slumberland that his skill and imagination rise to high Art.
I wish I had space to show more. The rest of his work is easily found on the internet.
It was only a dream.