Portal:Animation/Selected article/6

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act—the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst later curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), after producing about a minute of footage. Though popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had earlier made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912), and the American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier; having a character with an appealing personality distinguished Gertie from these earlier "trick films". John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques, and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films—some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments—and has been preserved in the US National Film Registry.