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Director: Winsor McCay
Production Date: ca. 1918-1921
Stars: Flip
Rating: ★★
Review:
With ‘Flip’s Circus’ Winsor McCay returned to one of his stars from ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’.
This is a short and unfinished film featuring Flip performing tricks in a circus, a.o. with a large hippo-like animal called Baby. The film does not have much of a story, and is undoubtedly the weakest of McCay’s surviving films, despite the high quality of the animation.
Watch ‘Flip’s Circus’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s seventh film
To Winsor McCay’s sixth, unfinished film: Gertie on Tour
To Winsor McCay’s eighth film: Bug Vaudeville
Director: Winsor McCay
Production Date: ca. 1918-1921
Stars: Gertie the Dinosaur
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘Gertie on Tour’ is but a short fragment from an unfinished and unreleased film featuring the prehistoric star from ‘Gertie the Dinosaur‘ (1914).
In this excerpt Gertie lives in the modern world: she plays with a frog and with a streetcar, then she dreams she’s back in the Mesozoic, dancing for her dinosaur friends.
‘Gertie On Tour’, like almost all sequels, cannot compare to the first film. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see slightly more footage of this sympathetic brontosaur. The dancing scene in particular catches her playful spirit. Like ‘The Centaurs‘, this short contains very beautiful and elaborate backgrounds, which, undoubtedly thanks to the invention of the cell, are a great improvement over the backgrounds in ‘Gertie The Dinosaur’, which had to be retraced over and over again for each single frame.
Watch ‘Gertie on Tour’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s sixth film
To Winsor McCay’s fifth, unfinished film: The Centaurs
To Winsor McCay’s seventh, unfinished film: Flip’s Circus
Director: Winsor McCay
Creation Date: ca. 1918-1921
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
After completing four masterpieces, Winsor McCay produced three unfinished films, ‘The Centaurs’, ‘Gertie on Tour‘ and ‘Flip’s Circus‘ (all animated about ca. 1918-1921). ‘The Centaurs’ is the most interesting of the three.
This short film feels like a study. We see a female and a male centaur meeting each other, then we see the male centaur introduce his future wife to his parents, and then suddenly their baby jumps into the scene, frolicking around.
This film once again contains superb animation, rendering totally convincing centaurs. They indeed stand comparison to those of ‘Fantasia’, which were animated about twenty years later. In this short McCay also experiments with his creations moving behind his elaborate backgrounds, creating a great feel of depth.
Watch ‘The Centaurs’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Winsor McCay’s fifth film
To Winsor McCay’s fourth film: The Sinking of the Lusitania
To Winsor McCay’s sixth, unfinished film: Gertie on Tour
