His greatest comic strip success was the children's fantasy comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which he began in 1905. He began working as a newspaper illustrator full-time in 1898, and in 1903 began drawing comic strips. He earned a living as a young man drawing portraits and posters in dime museums, and attracted large crowds with his ability to draw quickly in public. 1869–1934) produced prodigiously detailed and accurate drawings since early in life. An intertitle declares: "The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser! And yet they tell us not to hate the Hun". The liner vanishes from sight, and the film closes with a mother struggling to keep her baby above the waves. Ī second blast rocks the Lusitania, which sinks slowly into the deep as more passengers fall off its edges, and the ship submerges amid scenes of drowning bodies. The liner tilts from one side to the other and passengers are tossed into the ocean. Passengers scramble to lower lifeboats, some of which capsize in the confusion. After some time, a German submarine cuts through the waters and fires a torpedo at the Lusitania, which billows smoke that builds until it envelops the screen. The liner passes the Statue of Liberty and leaves New York Harbor. McCay is shown working with a group of anonymous assistants on "the first record of the sinking of the Lusitania". Intertitles boast of McCay as "the originator and inventor of Animated Cartoons", and of the 25,000 drawings needed to complete the film. The film opens with a live-action prologue in which McCay busies himself studying a picture of the Lusitania as a model for his film-in-progress. His subsequent animation output suffered setbacks, as the film was not as commercially successful as his earlier efforts, and Hearst put increased pressure on McCay to devote his time to editorial drawings. McCay and his assistants spent twenty-two months making the film. McCay drew these earlier films on rice paper, onto which backgrounds had to be laboriously traced The Sinking of the Lusitania was the first film McCay made using the new, more efficient cel technology. The film followed McCay's earlier successes in animation: Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). In 1916, McCay rebelled against his employer's stance and began work on the patriotic Sinking of the Lusitania on his own time with his own money. McCay was required to illustrate anti-war and anti-British editorial cartoons for Hearst's papers. The event outraged McCay, but the newspapers of his employer William Randolph Hearst downplayed the event, as Hearst was opposed to the U.S. In 1915, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the RMS Lusitania 128 Americans were among the 1,198 dead. The National Film Registry selected it for preservation in 2017. The film is the earliest surviving animated documentary and serious, dramatic work of animation. At twelve minutes it has been called the longest work of animation at the time of its release. It is a work of propaganda re-creating the never-photographed 1915 sinking of the British liner RMS Lusitania. The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) is an American silent animated short film by cartoonist Winsor McCay.
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