© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Winsor McCay's warped spaces
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Abstract |
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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.