Bon Voyage (1944) & Aventure Malgache (1944)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / Two shorts, 57 mins.


"I was overweight and overage for military service, but I knew if I did nothing I'd regret it for the rest of my life." - Alfred Hitchcock

When production was complete on Lifeboat – Alfred Hitchcock's 1944 war thriller – he left America and traveled back to England. He had made a commitment with producer Sidney Bernstein to direct two short propaganda films, made in England but spoken in French, to be distributed by the British Ministry of Information to encourage the efforts of the French Resistance. Although the director had been assimilating himself in American culture and cinema, he still felt a tenacious patriotism with his home country and sought to help the war effort any way he still could.

The results are Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure Malgache (1944), made in that order and each about thirty minutes apiece. Although they weren't features, they also were not trifles. Hitchcock had been assigned the two because of their political depth and nuance, and the Ministry of Information believe he, of all directors, would be able to deliver nuance in a superior way. Propaganda was also a serious business, and Hitchcock and the producers sought to make the two films as authentically French as could be, fearing the slightest flub in French mannerisms or lifestyle could lead the film to be scoffed at in France. (On a side note: Bon Voyage was given an initial treatment by V.S. Pritchett, and both shorts were written by Angus MacPhail, a writer and story editor whom Hitchcock had met when he worked as a young director in England.)

Of the two, Bon Voyage is the superior film in all regards. Its story is of a young RAF pilot who crashes into France and is helped to escape, although the identity of his accomplice is mysterious. The short feels very much like the kind of espionage film Hitchcock might have made for a studio in England or Hollywood (and indeed, he frequently mused that he wanted to bring a feature-length version of it to life). The story unfolds through two points of view – a structural effect that would reach its pinnacle in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, six years later – and there is good editing and lovely expressionistic cinematography. Whether it is effective as propaganda is an interesting point to consider; it is subtle (no more rousing than any anti-Nazi and pro-civilian film that came out of Hollywood) and at times I was rather caught up in its filmmaking style rather than in its story. Still, while brief and largely unseen, it would have been endlessly intriguing to see what kind of feature Hitchcock could have assembled without the constraints of the MOI.

Aventure Malgache – literal translation, "Malagasy Adventure," or an adventure in Madagascar – is perplexing and befuddled. While both films play around with the timeline of their plots, Aventure Malgache is not as successful. It is talky and dense, and although its narrative structure is out of joint like Bon Voyage, there is far too much cutting and time shifting to be appropriate for only thirty minutes. The story begins with the Molière players, sitting in the dressing room before a performance and swapping stories about a man who betrayed the Resistance and then their own adventures in the war, but it all runs together in sort of an incoherent blur. The Ministry of Information had its own troubles with Aventure Malgache, outside what a film critic might see. Called it too nuanced: high-ranking officers believed Hitchcock was incorrect in showing slight in-fighting and disagreement within the ranks of the French Resistance. The Ministry has a vested interest in portraying a solidly unified front with the Allies, and while Bon Voyage saw a limited release, for all intents and purposes Aventure Malgache was shelved.

The great historical irony of the excursion to England for the two propaganda shorts is that even though they were directed by Hitchcock – who had already overseen multiple masterpieces and whose first American feature won the Academy Award for Best Picture – they were scarcely shown. Bon Voyage was released into some French theaters, but Aventure Malgache, deemed unfocused in its criticism and advocacy, was shelved.

After the war they were hardly screened again and sat mostly unseen on the shelves at the British Film Institute for fifty years. In the early 1990s they were given proper release, mostly for curiosity's sake, and curiosity should be the only reason you check them out today.

Note: As short propaganda films, they are not frequently associated with Hitchcock's standard filmography and are thus not rated on the star scale.

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Pay Day (1922)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 21 mins.


Pay Day is one of Charles Chaplin's funniest short films, which in turn makes it one of his best short films period. It is tightly wound and expertly paced. Its jokes are wonderfully choreographed and hardly a single one falls flat; that might be its most impressive aspect.

Chaplin is not the Tramp in Pay Day, but an everyman married to a stern woman who inspires bouts of fear in his heart. (And anyway, the differences between the Tramp and Chaplin's generic everyman are largely negligible.) The everyman in Pay Day is a construction worker who butts heads with his tyrannical boss at the work site. At night, unwilling to go home and with a poker-hot paycheck burning a hole in his pocket, he goes out for celebratory drinks and shenanigans.

Pay Day was Chaplin's final short film and his penultimate film with First National before embarking on what was arguably his biggest commercial venture – forming United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. Pay Day is often lumped together with The Pilgrim (1923) as a film Chaplin made quickly to finish his contract and begin producing only features at United Artists. If that is indeed the case, it certainly doesn't show (unlike The Pilgrim, a longer quasi-feature-length film which really does feel more hurried and less organized than most of his films).

The humor works on two levels: the highly stylized and the silly slapstick. Consider the adroitness of two sequences on the construction site. The first is a series of gags that revolve around an elevator built into the scaffolding of a building, where the elevator moves up and down, bringing food away from men who are on lunch and pulling out seats from underneath people. The second is a brilliantly staged sequence that is run backwards in which Chaplin tosses, juggles, balances, and catches the bricks he is laying; it is so well done it demands to be watched numerous times, and might be some of the finest constructed humor in Chaplin's filmography.

The first half of Pay Day focuses on the stylized humor, but the slapstick in the second half is still quite effective; most of the slapstick involves a drunk Chaplin, particularly as he struggles to board a streetcar. (I'm always amazed at how effective Chaplin's alcohol humor is, even 80 years later. It is a rare comedian indeed who could turn inebriation into sophistication.)

Chaplin is one of my favorite directors, and certainly one of the most talented auteurs in cinema. His towering achievements – The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator – are achievements of pure cinema, not merely of comedy or of his own career. As such, they should seen by all, regardless of any interest in Chaplin as a man or as a performer. But aside from those, if asked to recommend only two of the his early works, I'd say The Kid for its pathos and Pay Day for its comedy.

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The Idle Class (1921)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 31 mins.


The Idle Class is a tale of two fools – one rich, one poor, both played by Charles Chaplin with exacting physical humor. The richer fool is a man with a drinking problem and a neglected wife (Edna Purviance) who has stopped tolerating it. The poorer fool is his standard Tramp, hitching a joyride on a train and ending up at a golf course where he gets into predictably funny trouble. The two fools eventually find themselves crossing paths at the rich wife's costume party.

It's a highly effective short film in terms of its humor, a great example of Chaplin unmistakably firing on all cylinders. Made toward the end of Chaplin's time with First National, per usual Chaplin performs the roles of star, director, writer, producer, editor, and composer. The gags are quite funny, particularly one which I would love to share but would be remiss to spoil. (All I'll say is that it involves some crying and the mixing of a martini.) Drinking is center stage for humor, as are numerous gags involving golf, which I've always found to be the sport most singularly susceptible to jokes and mockery.

The Idle Class circles back to familiar themes for Chaplin: look-a-likes and the disparity between the classes. Many of his films involve characters who pose as someone they are not (The Pilgrim and arguably City Lights) or look so much like another character they are involved in a bit of mistaken identity (Shoulder Arms and The Great Dictator). An equal emphasis is placed upon the utterly foolish ways the rich can behave and the utterly foolish antics that can occur when someone from the lower class is allowed to infiltrate the bourgeoisie (as at least one of his shorts at Mutual Studios shows, too). In either case, the boon goes to the audience, who is able to sit back and let the laughs flow from watching Chaplin perform with the smoothness of a dry martini.

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Sunnyside/A Day's Pleasure (1919)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 34 mins. & 18 mins., respectively


Charles Chaplin's two shorts from 1919 – Sunnyside and A Day's Pleasure – are individual, separate films but are best considered together as examples of the creative rut Chaplin had come to occupy. He'd directed more than 50 films (mostly shorts) in five years, and while there was typically one good gag in each, they weren't all great by any means. By 1919 he'd put a few jewels on his crown – One A.M. (1916) and The Immigrant (1917) with Mutual Films, A Dog's Life (1918) and Shoulder Arms (1918) with First National – but there was also a great deal of fool's gold.

Sunnyside is perhaps his least entertaining of his shorts. Its bizarrely disjointed plot finds the unnamed Chaplin character working a farm as a handy man. He's in love with a young woman but soon finds his affection challenged by a visitor from the city. Most of the humor in the short is stale; its one good gag occurs early on, with the farm's boss trying to force the Tramp out of bed and begin his daily chores. A Day's Pleasure, for its part, suffers the same fate (including a retread of the boat humor of The Immigrant), except its inspired moment of humor comes at the end when the unnamed Chaplin character (married with children) faces off against two irate police officers stuck in a puddle of tar. They're disappointments in an overall splendid career, and two years later Chaplin bounced back with what is considered his first masterpiece, The Kid (1921).

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The Bond (1918)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 11 mins.


Douglas Fairbanks, Al Jolson, and Mary Pickford were among the celebrities enlisted by the government to make public appearances in support of the U.S. Liberty Bond financial effort during World War I. Charles Chaplin made appearances, too, but perhaps his most widespread effort came in the form of a 1918 propaganda short called The Bond, which he made at his own expense.

Because it's propaganda, there's no doubt the film plays it safe in terms of its comedy, which may be why it's not very funny. Using a plain black set with bright white props (no doubt to keep costs down), The Bond attempts to show in a humorous manner the varieties of American bonds – friendship, marriage, and of course financial bonds, which empower Chaplin to take a gigantic mallet to the Kaiser's head. The film is perhaps only of interest to those interested in Chaplin's early career. (Those who are aware of his full career, however, will find it ironic that he make a propaganda short free of charge for the U.S. government, which would later revoke his re-entry permit during the height of McCarthyism.)

Note: The Bond can barely be considered an official entry into Chaplin's filmography, and it has not been rated on the star scale.

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Chaplin at Mutual (1916-1917)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / Twelve shorts, 231 mins.


Although he had made dozens of short films with Keystone and Essanay Studios, Charles Chaplin's career can't be said to have wholly taken off until he moved to Mutual Studios in 1916. He was only 27-years-old and had been making motion pictures for only two years, but Mutual signed him for $600,000 (or more than the equivalent of $10 million today) and gave him a production budget and creative control that were practically unlimited. In the year he spent at Mutual he wrote, directed, and starred in twelve two-reel shorts (commonly known today as "the Chaplin Mutuals," appropriately enough), which had a tremendous influence on silent comedy and his career. Soon Chaplin would be an international movie star – really the first person to claim that title – and people from all languages would immediately recognize the man with the black derby, over-sized suit, stylish cane, and toothbrush mustache. Looking back fifty years later in autobiography, Chaplin mused his year with Mutual might have been the happiest of his career.

You can see the happiness, too. When Chaplin left Essenay he brought a preferred cast with him, including Eric Campbell, Albert Austin, Lloyd Bacon, and Edna Purviance (his standard leading lady and at-the-time romantic fling). The repetition of familiar faces in many different roles throughout the Mutual shorts produces the feeling of a vaudeville troupe. Not all of the shorts are brilliant successes (as his career progressed and with each move, from Mutual to First National and then to United Artists, Chaplin's successes became stronger and more consistent), but they are all nevertheless charming and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny across the board. Even the so-called "worst" of the Mutual shorts is entertaining.

In these early films Chaplin perfected his favorite characters – the Tramp for himself, the rest of his cast filled with working-class people pushing against buffoonish and angry authority figures – and laced the plots with his typical biting satire. A Chaplin character and his boss each vie in silly ways for the affection of a rich heiress in The Count (1916), and in The Adventurer (1917) Chaplin plays an escaped convict who bluffs his way through high society. The Cure (1917) takes the impolitic to a whole new level when Chaplin plays a drunk who checks himself into a drying-out facility, along with a trunk full of alcohol.

The shorts also allowed him to perfect the art of slapstick. In his first film for Mutual, The Floorwalker (1916), Chaplin plays a customer in a department store who discovers the floor manager is conspiring to embezzle funds. Naturally the hapless Chaplin character foils the plot along with performing a "mirror image" gag with the thief and a well-placed "running staircase" (escalator) that provides ample fodder. The Fireman (1916) allowed Chaplin to display his impressive athleticism; as a freshman firefighter he scales the outside of a burning building to save a woman trapped within, action that foreshadows the physical feats of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The Cure provides some of the zaniest slapstick from the entire twelve shorts as Chaplin and two others struggle with a revolving door.

The Pawnshop (1916) and Behind the Screen (1916) further the slapstick, with the first involving a delicate balancing act on a ladder and the second involving a strategically placed trapdoor. Behind the Screen also exemplifies Chaplin's humanity for his characters; his stagehand character has coworkers who go on strike and he falls for a woman so poor she masquerades as a man to get work. The same compassion occurs in The Vagabond (1916); as a wandering musician, Chaplin's Tramp character tries to help an abused gypsy girl, and the film relies more on tender humor for smiles rather than slapstick for laughs.

The best of the Mutual shorts are, of course, the most brilliantly executed and the funniest. Easy Street (1917) has Chaplin playing a reformed tramp who volunteers with the police force to patrol one of the city's troubled neighborhoods, leading to a funny bit involving the diminutive Chaplin intimidated by a comically large street tough who Chaplin takes down with a broken street lamp. (It must be seen to be believed.) His impeccably graceful roller skating skills are displayed in The Rink, a short from 1916 that stars Chaplin as a hapless waiter who foils the rest of the restaurant staff with his clumsy antics. (Both concepts, skating and waiting, would be hammered into smooth genius for Modern Times.)

But if you only had time for one or two of the Mutual shorts, you'd best be served with his most sentimental and his most hilarious. The sentimental one – The Immigrant (1917) – is the only Mutual short in the National Film Registry and represents the manic writing style Chaplin could be known for. He reportedly wrote it as he filmed it, with the second half written and filmed first and then the first half devoted to establishing some reason a Tramp-like character would be poor. Chaplin settled on the idea that the character was a penniless and recent immigrant, and while the writing process might sound like the short would suffer from chaos, it's one of the better ones for its simplicity and softness alone. The humor is often heartbreaking; the immigrant finds a coin on the street and puts it in his pocket, where the coin falls through a hole, and after his large meal he discovers he doesn't have the coin on him – to the chagrin of a large, angry waiter.

The funniest is One A.M. (1916), a virtual one-man show and brilliant piece of slapstick. Chaplin stars as a drunk man who comes home but struggles against a series of inanimate objects to get from the front door to his bed. Nothing is off limits for Chaplin's physical comedy – the rugs, the staircase, the clock, the table, the coat-rack, and the Murphy bed are all wonderful dancing partners for his signature blend of humor. Arguably One A.M. is the best overall, but all twelve of the Mutual shorts are little treasures.

Chaplin's short films produced for Mutual Studios are in public domain. They are available in varying qualities of DVD presentation and are available for online streaming at archive.org.

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Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies (1929-1939)

d. Ub Iwerks, Burton Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, David Hand / USA / Ten selected shorts, 84 mins.


Walt Disney could have gone the easy way. Mickey Mouse was a wildly successful character, and he could stuck with the profit-yielding formula. But he was a visionary who rarely satisfied (as clichéd as it sounds, it's still true). As his studio made Mickey Mouse cartoons, Disney also turned his attention to a new series – dubbed "Silly Symphonies." They were glorious experiments, short animated trial balloons if you will, each building upon the foundation laid by the previous. The ten-year run of Silly Symphonies pushed the skill of his animators, the imagination of his writers, the possibilities of the technology, and the judgment of the audience to new realms, all toward Disney's ultimate goal: a full-length animated movie (realized in 1937 with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

All together, there were 75 short films made under the banner Silly Symphonies – not all of them great. Seven won Academy Awards for Short Animated Film, including the first award ever given in the category. The studio dominated the category for six consecutive years. The best of the series are the groundbreaking ones and the surprising ones, whose influence continues to be felt all the way through to today's television cartoons – shorts like Ub Iwerks's The Skeleton Dance, the brilliant antics of The Tortoise and the Hare, the technological wonder of Flowers and Trees, and beautifully crafted art of The Old Mill.

Considering its grim sense of humor and delightfully dark subject matter, The Skeleton Dance (1929) might seem today a genuinely odd choice for the first of these Disney's shorts. After all, we have come to associate the Disney brand with wholesome and bubbly entertainment, yet lest we forget the disturbing elements of Disney's first films – the forest in Snow White, the underworld of Fantasia, the imprisonment of Dumbo's mother. The subject matter was a perfect fit for Iwerks's distinctive style of animation in the early Disney shorts. His thick and smooth lines, generous use of black ink, and comically bulbous character bodies are today as instantaneously recognizable as Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's post-impressionist swirls, or Hopper's isolated people. Iwerks was a tremendously efficient animator, rumored to have drawn Disney's Steamboat Willie by himself in only two weeks (or 600 to 700 drawings per day).

The Three Little Pigs (1933) proved to be the most popular of the shorts, with theaters running it alone several times per day. Adapted from the tale of the same name, the short hit the screen at the right time in American culture: the Great Depression was under way, World War II was coming to a boil in Europe, and audiences were looking for relief. "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" was the song two of the pigs sing as they build their shaky homes, and it became an accidental anthem in the days following Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The short is notable, too, for bringing to life the ignorant stereotypes pervasive in Hollywood at the time: in the initial version of the short, the Big Bad Wolf appears the brick house dressed as a Jewish peddler. (Today the image has been excised from available copies, dressing the wolf instead as a Fuller Brush salesman.) The same cultural ignorance can be found in many other Silly Symphonies, including the stereotypical depiction of a black woman in Three Orphan Kittens (1935). Kittens seems to be the most superficial upon first glance, but it is one of the best in terms of developing the techniques of great animation: a powerful blizzard allowed the animators to practice drawing the weather; crystal clear reflections of the kittens on a shiny kitchen floor; and attempts at creating movable depictions of three-dimensional objects (instead of remaining static, a couch "twists" as real object would when a kitten runs past).

As the series continued, the animators grew in talent and skill. Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first film ever produced in three-strip Technicolor, an enormous visual leap in terms of developing color films. Disney gambled shrewdly on Technicolor and its inventor, and succeeded wildly. He signed an agreement with the inventor that allowed he and he alone to produce exclusively the only Technicolor shorts for the first three years. Today the film looks commonplace (we're so used to color), but its tender story – of two trees in love, fighting back an evil tree wishing to set the forest on fire – is still charming and entertaining. The Goddess of Spring (1934) was Disney's first attempt at actual human characters. Adapted from the Greek myth of Persephone, the beautiful girl travels with Hades on a disturbing and imaginative journey into the underworld.

Like The Three Little Pigs and The Goddess of Spring, some of the more successful shorts incorporated old fables and set the standard for animated adaptations. Aesop would be paid homage to in The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), where a carefree grasshopper fiddles his way through happiness while proclaiming the "world owes me a livin'." (The grasshopper's voice is by the same man who would forever be remembered as the voice of Goofy.) The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and its sequel, Toby Tortoise Returns (1936), reproduce Aesop's tale more effectively, with the famed race in the former and a witty boxing match in the latter.

In addition to their stories, both films were significant technological advancements, too. In supplemental features to the DVD release of the Silly Symphonies, Leonard Maltin notes The Grasshopper and the Ants used color as an actual component to tell a story, and The Tortoise and the Hare marked Disney's first attempts at depicting animated speed and giving its characters postures and actions that define their personalities. (Tex Avery admitted Max Hare from the latter film greatly influenced the development of Bugs Bunny.) Opposite the long line of adaptations, Music Land (1935) is one of the best original stories told. Riffing on Romeo and Juliet and the disapproval of jazz by stodgy old people in the 1930s, the short depicts a battle raging between two kingdoms – classical music and jazz music – when a violin and a saxophone fall in love.

From a technical standpoint, The Old Mill (1937) might be the most impressive of the Silly Symphonies. Its story is nearly nonexistent, taking a backseat to its atmosphere. Animals inhabit an abandoned mill standing serenely in the middle of a field and next to a pond, but when a harsh storm blows in, we watch how the animals take cover and protect themselves. The real star of the short is the multiplane camera, utilized and perfected here for the first time by Disney. (The multiplane camera gives a flat piece of animation unmistakable depth by moving several layers of art simultaneously.)

Disney's studio made a few more Silly Symphonies after The Old Mill, but the series was capped in 1939, ten years and seven Oscars after its debut. By that point Disney and his animators had learned the tools necessary to begin producing full-length animated features. They're prized for their experimentation, yes, but let's not forget how joyfully entertaining they also are.

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Steamboat Willie (1928)

d. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks / USA / 8 mins.


The near-misses and colossal failures of history are endlessly fascinating, and by that standard the story of Bert Glennon's 1928 independent film Gang War is the stuff of film legend. The movie had an all-star cast (including Olive Borden and the last performance of Jack Pickford, respectively playing the roles of a dancer and a saxophonist caught in the midst of a gang-related turf war). It was originally meant to be a silent feature, but synchronized sound – at that point, still a relatively new technical advancement – was added before it hit the screen. It might have been something big, but when it opened, reaction was rather flat. To make matters worse for those involved, in November 1928 a cartoon from a struggling entrepreneur would be attached to Gang War for a two-week screening at the Colony Theater in New York City. In two weeks Gang War had been completely eclipsed by the eight-minute cartoon that preceded it, and the film began its long descent into obscure cocktail party trivia.

It was not just any cartoon, mind you. Steamboat Willie, the labor of love from entrepreneur Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks, revolutionized animation and put the near-bankrupt Disney on the map. It introduced the public to the character Mickey Mouse and was the first cartoon in history to have a post-produced soundtrack of dialogue (or what passes of Mickey's squeaking dialogue) and synchronized sound effects with orchestral music that mirrored the on-screen action. Response to Steamboat Willie during the initial two-week run was overwhelming; after its engagement at the Colony, it opened at the Roxy in New York, at that time the largest theater in the world.

The mythology about Steamboat Willie sometimes gets carried away, much to its studio's pleasure I assume. It was not Mickey Mouse's screen debut; Disney and Iwerks had made two failed silent cartoons before. Although it is regarded as the first animated short with synchronized sound, it wasn't the first time animation had any sound at all. (Max Fleischer, of Betty Boop and Popeye fame, had produced some failed cartoons with sound effects previously.) And yet the effect of Steamboat Willie probably can't be overstated. November 2008 will be be eighty years since it premiered, and it's still being watched, analyzed, canonized, and broadcast, not to mention possessing a recognizable style that pops against the superhighway of slick, stylized, rainbow-glow animation. (The shot of Mickey spinning the wheel and whistling might be the most recognizable shot in animation.) Steamboat Willie gave Disney the boost he needed. From there he would go into making more Mickey cartoons and create his Silly Symphonies line of shorts, which allowed his animators to experiment on enough techniques to sustain what would lead to the first feature-length animated film and beyond.

Disney is usually given all the credit for the short's success (indeed, credit for most of the films he shepherded although he was hardly ever the director), but it's important to recognize Ub Iwerks's role in the production. Iwerks first sketched Mickey as a character; he and Disney wrote and directed Steamboat Willie together; and Iwerks animated it almost exclusively on his own. The combination of all the elements – a likable character, creative risks, personalized animation, the desire avoid failure – all made the film so popular in its initial release and durable as a work of cinema. It's remained fresh and crisp, and the jokes are worth a smile or two if you don't mind some casual animal cruelty. (All in good fun, of course.) It's one of those occurrences when the film is important historically and yet works as entertainment.

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The Short Films of Winsor McCay (1911-1921)

d. Winsor McCay / USA / Four shorts, 40 mins.


We marvel at the beauty and precision of animation today, but we no longer see animation the way previous generations must have. To fresh eyes, drawn pictures actually moving must have inspired awe; at least that's the impression one gets from Winsor McCay's short animated films.

Before there was Chuck Jones or Walt Disney, there was Winsor McCay, a cartoonist and animator who didn't invent the form but sits atop the pyramid as its most profound influence. McCay's films showcase not only the man's talent at illustration and creation but how much time, energy, and production went into the cartoons. No fewer than two of his films have real-life footage McCay "taking on a bet" that he wins through animation; no fewer than two of his films involve neatly stack reams of paper, upon which are implied to be the real drawings, that come tumbling down in chaos.

The films are simple and often surreal. His first film, Little Nemo (1911), was based on his famous newspaper comic strip and is only fractionally animated. Characters are literally broken down in lines, drawn, and shown coming to life, bopping around in humorous ways. His 1918 propaganda short The Sinking of the Lusitania imagines what the frightful torpedoing of the British luxury liner must have been like. (Watching it today, it's easy to spot how the images of the steamliner sinking bear a strange foreshadowing to the CGI of James Camerson's Titanic.) One of his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend films from 1921 shows how cheesecake can make a man have twisted dreams in which insects do acrobatic feats.

McCay's crowning achievement, however, remains Gertie the Dinosaur, a 1914 short film that is believed to be the first animated film to establish a character (and not simply be little goofy creations skipping around for chuckles), a fact that would have profound implications to Disney two decades later. Gertie, justly tucked away in the National Film Registry, has its roots in the theme of the miracle of animation; McCay is shown with his friends at a museum where they observe the skeleton of a dinosaur, and he makes a wager that he can bring the bones to life. Gertie – a jovial sauropod– is his animated meal ticket. Gertie lumbers around, eats rocks, gets embarrassed and has emotions, and teases a woolly mammoth named Jumbo (not the last time an elephant with the name Jumbo would be seen in animation). The cartoons are simplistic, but they're miniature feats of strength and ingenuity, perhaps more remarkable than the powerhouse Ub Iwerks, who drew all of his material alone more than a decade later. Just as one can watch A Trip to the Moon to appreciate Star Wars, or The Great Train Robbery to appreciate Red River, so should anyone who admires the art of animation take in McCay's short films for the history lesson.

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The Great Train Robbery (1903)

d. Edwin S. Porter / USA / 12 mins.


It's difficult to evaluate a film like The Great Train Robbery, a 12-minute long western that was among the first narrative films to be produced in America. If you're looking at it from a historical point of view, it's obviously a five-star feature in terms of its milestone status and technical innovations, much like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation would be. (Both films are justly preserved in the National Film Registry, but God, I can't think of any rational person who, if asked what movie they'd like to watch, would give either film as an answer.) Director Edwin S. Porter was a former cameraman for Thomas Edison's studio, and he was among the first to utilize the basic cinematic techniques that we see so often today and never think about needing to be invented: cross-cutting, slight camera movement, linear editing, on-location shooting, etc. (Unlike Griffith, however, Porter stubbornly refused to repeat techniques as he used them and he drifted into obscurity.)

As entertainment, it's no surprise The Great Train Robbery runs way too thin – thinner than even other silent films that would have been its contemporary, like A Trip To the Moon (made by Georges Méliès in France a year earlier). For the most part, silent films didn't really start to becoming wildly entertaining until German expressionism and the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; those productions were great and continue to feel spontaneous today despite their age. Spontaneity is not the strongest suit of The Great Train Robbery; its most exciting element is when a cowboy points his gun right into the camera and fires. Supposedly audiences at the turn of the century shrieked with fear, but I'd be surprised if your pulse quickened by one beat. The movie is short, simple, and widely available on the Internet (in public domain, of course), so it's worth Googling to see how American filmmaking began and how far it's come.

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A Trip to the Moon (1902)

d. Georges Méliès / France / 8 mins.
Alt: "Le Voyage dans la Lune."


Doesn't it make sense that most of the earliest films were either short documentaries or science fiction? At the time it must have seemed strange and futuristic to watch a moving narrative projected on a white drawn canvas, and after the early filmmakers established the basic technology to record everyday actions, it's no surprise some immediately began to dream big. Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon is the most famous of those early short films, and for good reason: it's fully realized, wildly imaginative, and possibly cinema's first true achievement. Unlike most early films – which we value solely for their historical relevance – Méliès's work provides a slight amount of curious entertainment. Frequently cited as the first sci-fi, and also entertaining in spite of its (extremely) nascent production quality, the film's plot is exactly what its title says: scientists travel to the moon via a bullet-shaped pod fired out of a gigantic cannon, resulting in that infamous shot of an anthropomorphic moon face getting hit right in the eye. No one goes into this film looking to be enlightened by science, and it's fair to have a good laugh on our early conceptions of space travel as long as you don't miss the fact that Méliès was actually poking fun at science himself. Because of its placement in the history of film and because of its trippy and expressionistic art design, it's definitely worth a look.

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