Deep diving students of both film history and dinosaur pop culture doubtless need no introduction to Gertie the Dinosaur, but for those unfamiliar, Gertie is the star of one of the earliest known animated short films. While short animated segments exist that predate her starring role (including several by her creator, Winsor McCay), most might be thought of more as “tech demos” to modern sensibilities, and so many hail her short as the first “true” fully animated cartoon. In truth, though, it was always meant to be presented as a hybrid production. The print that saw almost sole circulation for over a century (embedded below) features a live action film segment as a framing narrative, but Winsor originally envisioned it as part of a vaudeville act, with Gertie appearing to interact with him on stage.
The framing narrative in this film is very different to what the live action portion of the stage production would have been, with Gertie apparently never headlining as a solo act, for one thing. Additionally, the silent film version is of course reliant on intertitles (which is the industry term for the captions of silent film specifically), and has the downside of both minimizing the narrator’s input so as to not distract too much from the film, but also cutting out some of the frames of animation. By the modern day, this meant there was no surviving print of “pure” Gertie footage in circulation.
This is where The Gertie Project comes in. As explained by animation historian Donald Crafton in this post on animationstudies2.0, he, along with David L. Nathan, M.D. and Marco de Blois set about recreating a fully restored Gertie film. While no unedited original film was left to copy, most of Winsor original drawings were still available, meaning they simply have to scan them in the proper order to recreate the film. (Winsor took the laborious route of completely redrawing the entire scene for every frame of animation, as opposed to the later innovation of cutting out the individual characters and animating them atop a static background.) While a few drawing were still missing, it was a relatively simple step to replace these with a few frames drawn in Winsor’s style (with a watermark to clearly denote to film students where such insertions had been made). To more fully recreate the original experience, but also add his own mark & update it for a modern audience, Prof. Crafton took it upon himself to write his best recreation one of the possible vaudeville performances, which was performed in conjunction with the restored footage’s premiere at the Annecy International Animation Festival in France in June of 2018. He also decided to write a brief playlet to introduce Winsor as a person to general audiences for future showings where the show’s historical context might otherwise go unappreciated. This version of the show, titled “Winsor & Gertie”, premiered in 2018 at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, in Pordenone, Italy.
Earlier this September I had the opportunity to attend a staging of this playlet at the theatre school at the University of Texas at Dallas. Eschewing the narrative of the silent film’s framing narrative, as well as whatever the original vaudeville performance might have been, it instead depicts some domestic scenes during the period in which Winsor produced the Gertie short. It was perhaps a little cliche, with the primary drama revolving around his long hours at work in attempt to finish the film on time whilst his wife feels neglected at home as a result, but it was a serviceable narrative, particularly in terms of introducing the relevant historical context to laypeople. The climax of the play of course hangs on Gertie’s grand debut, with this scene beginning en media res during Winsor’s broader vaudeville act. The audience is treated to an additional cartoon sequence, one of the aforementioned “tech demo” style cartoons Winsor produced, featuring the “Little Nemo” characters that he ALSO regularly drew for daily newspaper comic pages. This plays while Winsor and his wife reconcile off to the side, whereafter he comes back to center stage to engage with Gertie.
“Winsor’s” interaction with Gertie was well acted, with the reaction of my boys being perhaps the best testament to this segment! I had brought them along with me, despite my suspicion proving true that they got bored and distracted during the preshow discussion and many of the pre-Gertie theatrical scenes. Once the interactions with Gertie began, however, they were rapt with attention, and laughed out loud at Gertie’s antics, a reaction I doubt the silent film alone could have drawn out of them! After it’s all over, Winsor delivers a touching soliloquy about how Gertie will go on to inspire countless cartoon descendants; people, dogs, cats… “maybe even mice”. (Insert winking emoji here.)
I’m glad I got the chance to get out with friends and experience this delightful bit of historic media. This production was the show’s Texas debut (university notice here, The Dallas Morning News article here), but it has previously been staged in Amsterdam, Brussels, Tübingen, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Notre-Dame, Indiana. Keep an eye out for it in case it ever comes your way. Gertie herself is an important piece of history to both film nerds and paleonerds everywhere, and I’d say this production does an admirable job of keeping her legend alive. I happily give it my enthusiastic recommendation, as well as my Dino Dad “Stomp of Approval”!
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