Gertie the Dinosaur

When Winsor McCay unveiled Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, he did not simply screen a film—he performed with it. Standing before the screen with a whip and commanding voice, McCay appeared to give live orders to the animated dinosaur, who obeyed, sulked, wept, and finally lifted her master (a drawn version of him) onto her back. This poster advertised that vaudeville act, in which the boundary between showman and cartoon dissolved before a live audience.

Gertie is celebrated as a landmark of character animation. Earlier films had made lines wiggle and objects transform, but Gertie had a personality: she was playful, stubborn, and endearing, an animated creature the audience came to feel for. McCay achieved this through painstaking hand-drawing, a monumental labor of repeated figures that made the illusion of weight and will possible. The poster is a document of a pivotal moment when a newspaper cartoonist stepped onto the stage and proved that a drawing could act.