Skip Navigation

Screen 2007 48(4):463-473; doi:10.1093/screen/hjm048
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Telotte, J.P.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved

Winsor McCay's warped spaces

J.P. Telotte


  Abstract

This essay examines the use of space in a variety of Winsor McCay's animated films, from Gertie the Dinosaur to The Pet. While recent animation criticism, such as that of Esther Leslie and Paul Wells, has emphasized the links between the cartoon and the avant garde in the 1920s and 1930s, that commentary has largely excluded McCay's work from consideration, in part because of its obvious embeddedness in the popular discourse of vaudeville and the newspaper comic strip. I want to establish a similar link for McCay by focusing on how his films engage with space – how it becomes not simply the site of narrative but an implicit subject of his narratives as well. In that treatment we can see another dimension of the modernist spirit at work, a level on which his films implicate not simply an assault an on the social status quo, such as we find in later animated films, but also on what we might term the phenomenological status quo, that is, on both the organization of and the audience's experience of space itself.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.