In 1914, Winsor McCay, who was America’s leading comic strip artist (“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” etc.), produced a seven minute fully animated film to include in his vaudeville act. Gertie was an adorable trained dinosaur that danced for the audience and responded to the artist’s commands. Bringing the beast to life required thousands of individual hand-made drawings Now, Crafton and his research partners are reanimating the film using the original camera footage and the surviving original drawings. Furthermore, they will reconstruct McCay’s vaudeville act to simulate its live performance environment. Key questions arise concerning the ontology of animation cinema and, indeed, early cinema in general, and their complex relationships to the stage and live performance.
Donald Crafton, the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor Emeritus, taught a variety of courses in media history, criticism, and theory at the University of Notre Dame. His previous research includes Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (1990), a monograph on the French cinema pioneer and inventor of animation cinema; Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (1982, revised 1993), which was the first survey of animation in the silent cinema; The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (1999) and Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2012). In 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named him an inaugural Academy Film Scholar.
"The Gertie Project" will be held at DePaul’s Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State.
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