Animation pioneer Winsor McCay draws Gertie the Dinosaur for a group in this undated photo.

Winsor McCay is well known as the creator of the first animated cartoon star, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914. He also is remembered for his animated recreation of The Sinking of the Lusitania, 1918 and for his long and amazing career as a comic strip artist. He also wrote “Lesson One,” but his work as a teacher of the art form he helped to create has long been forgotten.

A copy of “Lesson One” printed in Applied Cartooning, Division 11, a correspondence course from the Federal School of Applied Cartooning, Minneapolis, Minn., 1919, was shown to me a few months ago by one of my animation history students who remembered seeing an image in the lesson in class. He found it in a “junk store” and had no idea it was a rare document. He considered it an old fashioned oddity and was wondering if it had any value (perhaps the influence of Antique Roadshow). It is so obscure that I can find no references to it in printed bibliographies about animation. When I told John Canemaker, author of Winsor McCay, His Life and Art, that I had a Xerox copy of it, he asked for a copy. He had seen a 1923 version published by the school. It is mentioned in a footnote in his book.

McCay worked hard to make Gertie the Dinosaur's breathing pattern realistic.

McCay’s 15-page lesson isn’t everything you ever wanted to know about the subject, but it does give insight into his work and his optimism for the future of animation. It was one of the very first published accounts of how animation is done. It dates a year before the publishing of Edwin George Lutz’s Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development (1920), the manual that Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks studied when they were beginning their careers.

Terms Have Changed
As you look at the pages of this manuscript reproduced in this issue, one of the first things you may notice is that McCay’s terminology is different from our present animation vocabulary. He never mentions animation cels, but says he uses transparent, bond and tracing paper. He says flit and flitter pad while we say flip and flipbook. At one point he mentions that seeing “little flipper advertising pads” gave him the idea that he might be able to create a film based on sequential drawings.

Text Fig. 12 Drawings Indicating Positions of Tossed Ball in Animation, Using the Split System The crosses at the corners indicate register markings by means of which you place each subsequent drawing in correct position over the preceding. If you use punched paper and pegs on drawing board you may dispense with register marks.

Applied Cartooning, Division 11. All illustrations © 1919 Federal School of Applied Cartooning.