little nemo

[dunkersonleann]

i love little nemo

[BastardJack]

Man I want to see what happens next :/

[thediscopimpernell]

This guy was inhumanly good!

[boxpilot]

honk honbk

[Gernam12]

I just looked at the end; 4000 frames... I am speechless.

[Gernam12]

2 whole minutes, and everything was done on his own! This is ridiculous; no one would even attempt doing something like this today!

[azuz6778]

I got this from my art class. Did you know for the colors the drawer painted them on the black and white tape?

[rang3r34]

Awesome animation!

[LeesaLovesYou13]

That's really really cool! But really creepy! And what's going on?

[Milkman84]

I wanna know who the morons are that 'disliked' this. What planet are you from?

[robchalfen]

hand-colored; no color film stock til much later, late 20's

[sugarte92]

amazing animation butttt wttttffffff was going on????? 0.0

[papelnaranja]

Simplemente fabuloso!!!!! Mo pense que era tan bueno!

[Angeliclily]

O_O Amazing.

[dechha1981]

Very impressive, especially when you considder that, at this point, they were still figureing out what an animated cartoon was AT ALL. This was animated when Walt Disney himself was 9.

[sfighter991]

That was really amazing, pre-dates "Rotorscoping" for the Fleisher Cartoons.

[Gameguru667]

is there any proof this is REALLY from over a hundred years ago?

[msms47]

2:02 fuk he holding the pic nummber 4000 lol this video was just a small notic book >.>

[TheMrSunShine22]

CANNOT belive how old this is! That man had talent god!

[lovetoletyoudown]

that was quite cute =^-^=

[nicorivas]

First animations, also portraying the art of animating itself, everything starts in self reference!

[teckwizz123]

is that how people were back then?!?!?!?

lol

[MintChocoFusion]

i'm in love <)

[shortiewon]

Hey , anyone interested in flash animation pls inbox me.

anyway, i love classic cartoon like this, thanks for sharing.

[dolphinluv2413]

Beautiful!

[AnimePRFury]

Thank you that McCay was born, otherwise the world would have missed out on such an amazing and talented man. Oh, sure, animation would have been realized by someone, but I have a feeling it would have been years from the time of Gertie the dinosaur and Nemo with his adventures in Slumberland *puts on WAKE UP hat and exits the building*

[Dragonrider1227]

Did he really handdrawn this all himself? Man, I don't even have the attention span to make animation on a computer, forget having to handdraw it all X_X Especially back then!

[CAMILOERNESTO47]

simplemente hermoso. Hace 100 años ya se intuía como generar una película de dibujos animados con todos los elementos cómicos posibles, y el resultado es evta joya. El mundo le debe todo a la fantasía y a la belleza de Winsor Mc Cay

[gabdestroyw]

C'est vraiment génial. La ligne est tellement belle et les personnages sont adorables. McCay est un génie...

[Rodita1]

I just love Little nemo comic strip.s Very cute animation. McCay is a genious.

[CalyxAsgard]

This new fangled animation fad? It will never take off. 8P

[nebaneba55]

100 times better than lately anime in my country

[buzzlightyear10]

This is unreal, cannot believe how good this is!

[DJCandyManMike]

@buzzlightyear10

I know this phrase gets thrown around a lot, but I think it's safe to say that Winsor McCay was far ahead of his time.

[racookster]

Damn, McCay's work is beautiful.

[squeege421]

This so called, newfangled, animation has no where to go but up in my opinion.

[mewletter]

Wow. I just witness the very FIRST flash animator's show. Instant favorite for me!

[Mesterius1]

What do you mean, flash animator's show?

[gatheringleaves]

wow this is adorable!

[xipaul]

WhOa Little Nemo c'est une caille il fait des graffitis sur les murs wesh xD

vraiment très impressionnant c'était un génie Winsor McCay :D

[syrupneko]

man. this is great. Winsor McCay was such the excellent draftsman that this has the effect and look of rotoscoping or modern 3d cellshading. Thank you posting this!

[Balthaz369]

Tellement bien, et innovant en plus. La simple ligne du dessin et quelques couleurs. Génial. Et dire qu'en cherchant "little nemo" maintenant, une fois sur deux on tombe sur un poisson...

[DJCandyManMike]

For that period in time, I'm very impressed with the animation!

[IKFKSwitch]

Absolutely sublime. Love the turnaround on the dragon.

The music is beautiful. Does anyone know what it is, and if that was the tune used in the original score?

[TSLuciaMiel]

KNOCK IT OFF, FLIP!

[keepjoy]

@TSLuciaMiel fuck yeah

[allesordernichts]

This is amazing for what they could achieve in those times!

I mean I couldnt be asked to draw every single frame, NOT EVEN ONE...

awesome!!!

[beefMERCIFUL]

no special effects, just the raw, crazy drawing power of windsor mccay

[saraisotakuchan1990]

thanks for uploading! i always wanted to see how Little Nemo looked like :)

[TheRussellicious]

HHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

[TheCGIMaster]

oh damn almost 100 years old :D

[TheCGIMaster]

lol the car exploded :D

[xDlaughingxD]

wonderfull

[DaddyWalrusguy]

Wow this is not bad : )

[LomlonTheGreat]

Truely is amazing. This is actually the first color animation. He actually went in and colored each and every frame so it could be in color, a true genious of the animation world.

[oofoe]

are all those frames individually water-colored? Holy mother, this must have taken him YEARS... even at his inhumanly awesome pace.

[skeletal13]

According to Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic", it took about 4 years to complete. All by one guy.

[bsjt]

Incredibly beautiful. I was fascinated by reprints of this strip as a kid because I had started reading old Dick Tracy strips as well (the movie had just come out and I was obsessed with it), and I remember misreading something in Starlog or some fan mag around the time claiming Little Nemo was also getting a film - I thought they meant live-action adaptation. I'd still love to see it; McCay's surrealist vision is timeless. If we can do Where The Wild Things Are w/Spike Jonze, we can do Nemo.

[joryoreo]

I'm doing something close- Writing a feature length on winsors life and works- filled with surreal hand drawn animated sequences.

[Dnzd88]

that sounds awesome

[Dream2fear]

they did make an animated film for little nemo tho

[Ratty524]

There was a broadway musical produced of Little Nemo in Slumberland, there was also a video game and an '80s animated movie on Little Nemo as well. Personally, though, I like the original drawings and comic strips in comparison to the adaptations.

[greatestiron]

Pioneer in Animation industry !

[bugpowderdust]

fukc, this is adorable

[TheRussellicious]

lol cursing

[bugpowderdust]

lol, lol commenting

[horkenfrosten]

My favorite part is when the dragon walks away. It practically looks 3D!

[taylorbortnerathing]

@horkenfrosten little nemo, now in imax and real digital 3d

[JohnshiBRPG]

Wonderful!

[obnebur]

tripy !!

[TomPreston6]

I am amazed because animation was such a new thing at the time that he was able to maintain the figures proportions and shape as they moved through space (one of the hardest things to do in animation)

[obscureterminus]

That was awesome.  I heart the nemo!

[loboguara1]

This is absolutely incredible! I had no idea he'd done this, and I've seen every other bit of Little Nemo art he'd done!

[deomis]

this move was awesome!!!!! you people need to check it out, its about a boy that saves dream land from nightmare land, and the clown on the riht rides (at the end of this little clip) a giand raven

[maniaticx]

maravilloso

[sneezepal]

Man, this is so cool! The Saturday morning cartoon fare of today pales in comparison. Imagine how this must've looked to audiences in 1911.

[FoamyTheSquirrel2]

Makes you REALLY appreciate animation

[kaguth]

How did someone with no formal animation training have such an amazing eye for movement?

[InvaderJem]

One man did this?? Holy...! I am impressed.

[Invad3r]

Actually, there was a team of artists working behind the direction of McCay.

[Kirke182]

Every source I've read on this says McCay drew these himself.

[Invad3r]

You're right, I may have been thinking of something else. He drew every bit of this. He drew all of Gertie the Dinosaur too except the backgrounds.

[Kirke182]

Again, from what I've read, he drew everything on Gertie the Dinosaur.  The background had to be redrawn for each frame because there were no cels then. It was just him drawing on 10,000 sheets of paper.

[MinezEyez]

he drew gertie and the other animalsa but he had an assistant that drew the background for him through most of those papers. this stuff is so fun to learn about! i love gertie and i love little nemo. i wish i couldve sen a live performance wit gertie. i love that people thought it was magic back then.

[NamineKa]

No, there weren't people working in McCay's direction. Winsor McCay did every little thing himself. He was an extreme perfectionist. Every little detail, he drew. I heard he was a little arrogant because of this but he was amazing. The other earlier animators of the time did have teams doing the work for them though... Like Disney and Sullivan...

[Mesterius1]

Actually, the backgrounds in Gertie was really drawn by an assistant on each of the frames. From what I understand, McCay probably drew the background on the first sheet of paper himself, then brought in an assistant ot simply redraw his lines several thousand times on the rest of the papers. And of course McCay drew every bit of animation on Gertie himself.

[Artoveli]

Wow, this is so cool! I'm dying to get my hands on the old comics.

[Rabbit0]

Wow. Thanks for putting this up.

[madinpursuit]

Thank you for sharing this film!

[slumberlandsprincess]

love it whend the dragon rolls it's eyes

[intigfx]

so finely drawn and animated, it even has McKay's typical thick outer outline around the characters, that thing that became fashionable only in recent years, he already did 100 years ago.

one word: GENIUS

[boomcity312]

4,000 images in a month, INSANE.

[intigfx]

that's like 130+ a day, including the week-ends. any modern animator would squeal like a bitch if he was asked to do that.

[Mesterius1]

Yeah, but actually, that bet never played out like it does in the movie;) In reality, McCay spent about 3-4 years animating and then hand-coloring this movie. The bet was just made up for the film.

[Chickengirl005]

i'm guessing they left out the African guy in the Little Nemo in Slumberland movie...but yeah its pretty amazing this was done in 1911....

[upwen]

that would be The Imp

[Marbles471]

Just incredible. McKay did all this with basically NO precedent to guide him. He was relying purely on his skills as a draftsman and an incredible intuition.

The amazing thing is, by the time Walt Disney was revolutionizing animation nearly 25 years later, McKay's work had been largely forgotten. All of his marvelous discoveries had been cheapened and boiled down for mass production. What Disney did, without knowing it, was basically redisover McKay's discoveries, while then building on them.

[Lyktwz]

A Jewell. Whose is the Music?

[FuzzyDuck]

Thank you for uploading this great little film!

[Freethinker82]

McCay's accomplishments are nothing short of superhuman. How he could produce so much by himself I wish I knew.

[BruceLeedar]

I believe he did have assistants.

[abetterpepper]

Maybe, but i wouldn't be surprised if he drew every frame of this by hand, especially with all the repetition that goes on. He was a "lightning sketch" artist on vaudeville, and was able to draw a prodigious amount in relatively short order.

[HagiaSophia]

This is so amazing!!

What sense of space and just.. damn!!!

[evilstamos]

when was color added, or was it originally drawn in color for b&w film?

[wickedcapedkid]

Color has been around since the beginning of film. People used to directly color, tint, or dye negatives. I guess in this case he drew all the drawings first and then added the color later.

[ladytitaniarose]

Actually if I remember correctly, for this film he drew in black and white, shot on film, then hand painted the film frames one by one.

[MindlessWanderer]

really? I was told my animation professor that he actually drew these in color, shot them on film, which was B&W (like you said) and then used a paintbrush and handpainted each individual frame with the proper color because his audience was used to seeing Little Nemo in color, and didn't want to disappoint. By itself that's a feat, but remember, there were about 3000~4000 frames in the film, each frame is extremely small, and he handpainted each one. This man is awe inspiring, even after death.

[ninjakittyleo]

You are right mindlesswanderer. Mckay did draw every single frame himself. I first saw this in my history of animation class.

[Kitsune44X]

That's the way I understood it too, although he colored it for its novelty, not because an audience at the time expected color (although it had been done, in a sense, with tinted slides so as to convey night, a certain mood, etc). This cartoon and a few others like it were based off of a popular comic strip of the day, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," also drawn by McCay. It is the basis for the more well-known Japanese animation called "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland." Very, very cool.

[hidetolove]

I was under the impression that "Lilttle Nemo" did horribly when it first came out.

I have the book, the complete collection of the Little Nemo strips, and in the preface, they state his comics were unknown and had a pretty bad reception.

It's unbelievable, a man of such great talent, overlooked by so many!

[Mesterius1]

Actually, McCay's original "Little Nemo in Slumberland" comic strip is far more well-known and acclaimed than the Japanese-American movie adaption.

[taleydaley2012]

FLiP!

[aylastarsaphire]

A Pioneer of Surrealism.

[foffilollipopp]

winsor was the man!

disney is nothing compared to good ol' SILIAS.

i love winsor's work soo much, his work is, or was, so original, and was a revolution within comics and cartoons.

[Orionsaint]

not bad for 96 years ago

[annablanch]

stunning...

does anyone know what the music in the background is by chance?

[michiganabe]

"Berceuse" by Gabriel Faure

[BastardJack]

They don't make em like this anymore, its so simple yet so rich.

[sandrockg4]

this is by winsor mcCay. its based on his comic strips with the same name and characters. it was made in 1911. bitches.

-mcgraw-hill companies,2005

[JBerserk]

This looks like it was rendered in 3d... So cool!

[HIPERMOX]

3D ?! No Way Guy ! This Film is from 1890 year ! Disney was a little sperm !

[magikfl00t]

I am no longer astonished at the bizzare placement of such messages. After all when one thinks of "little nemo" one immediatly thinks of Fling Dating...

[illmasta]

The part when the dragon walks away blows my mind. This guy is truly amazing.

[AshehKitteh]

That is so cool! Im glad there are Little Nemo things on youtube :3

[putulicamea]

tell me this is made in 1910

???

[redsedas]

Wonderful. This is amazing for its time and it still is today.

[ebelillorocha]

hola pues aki NOMAS biendo un deste de little Nemo pues byeee♥♥ baiii♥♥♥ ADIOS

[closedmouth]

He probably could've saved himself a heap of work by cutting that "stretching" bit short... :-/

Great video, thanks.

[akimbonorman]

actually that is a loop ( reusing the same sequence of drawings in a loop) which sames work.

[Taloon64]

Haha! It's flip! He's a frightful fellow...frightfully funny, frightfully friendly, and he can make your dreams come true! -- or so he'd have you believe ;)

[firstjohn47and8]

Beautiful. Very reflective of the gilded age iot came from. Love Winsor Mccay.

[petervdploeg]

Nice!

Who the hell is this Walt D. guy anyway??

[noelleygreer]

you have to be kidding!

[kidokay]

disney's a rip-off artist

[Mesterius1]

Walt D? No Idea. Oh, wait!... I DO know about a famous animation producer named Walt!

Sir, you must be talking about Walt Lantz.

[nina695]

this is so fucking boring X_X

[xcar0982]

Historically, the Little Nemo animation is the second animation in be created, and like Gertie was also a McCay work, that makes he the father of animation. I never thought I could live to see this video.

[lilgisme]

Amazing. Lots of effort was put into this. All hand drawn. Astonishing.

[gregkrazanski]

it's ridiculous that this is all hand drawn. it's a shame most animation today cuts back on the cost of hand drawing all the frames by using crappy computer in-betweens. Keep in mind Dickiesan that there are lots of animes with a LOT of nice hand drawn frames. Another nice animation recently was the Triplets of Belleville.

[Dickiesan]

Amazingly, this animation is 100-times smoother then the great of that anime crap kids are slingin' about these days.

[Xiado]

Awesome. And that is awesome in the sense of inspiring awe, which is certainly more awesome than a hundred billion hot dogs, sir.

Absolutely beautiful.

[xaviervaltiel]

Amazing. I've always been a huge fan of Nemo and his adventures in Slumberland. And only Flip would start off doing something that was nearly impossible at the time: moving. Great vid.

[Iegend]

think about what he had to do back then and compare it to the flash animation programs that we have today

[ajlb07]

i love this. he had so much talent. now everything and anything can be done on a computer. <3

[PolaScalzo]

Arts don t depend on tecnologie...Arts depend on creativity! It s proved here!

:o)

[King1N]

1910? Wow!

[tecunX]

tom petty pays tribute to little nemo in the 1989 video runnin down a dream, problably the best video petty has ever done.

[Ran4444]

Where do i get this awesome videos?

I'd LOVE them in better quality versions (Ofc. more pixels, it's after all almost 100 years old!).

[patientvirtue]

amazing. good in everyway beyond belief =]

[deardeaddays]

winsor mccay is a god. i just got the complete nemo in slumberland collection and the man needs to be revered as a genius.

[Haku42]

aww, it's so cute ^ ^

[magnifique]

That's incredible.

[Extraordinaire]

There is a 6-minute "Little Nemo" pilot film from 1984 directed by Hayao Miyazaki's protege Yoshifumi Kondo (later director of "Whisper of the Heart) and animated at Telecom, which you can see here: http://video.google.com/videop­lay?docid=3342755205038857742&­q=little+nemo

I think they did the spirit of McCay justice. Too bad the final film in 1989 didn't reach the heights of the pilot film.

[ultimatemegadeath]

amazing...where'd you find this??

[KingJames37]

yup yup i do have to agree its so surreal, btw does anyone have a video of the ghibli production of little nemo?

[oracioroman]

ghibli produced a little nemo animation of their own?

[achaco]

It seems to be the one that "Ghibli" did not produce accurately, and "Telecom animation film" in which Hayao Miyazaki was on the register before collaborated on Japan-U.S. in 1989.

http://www.telecom-anime.com/t­elecom/sakuhinshokai/index.htm­l

[macnubnub]

Amazing, great talent for that era!

[pupuran]

You know, I've never seen one of McCay's animations before, except for this one black and white silent of Flip being the clown that he is infront of a curtain on stage.

They are absolutely beautiful! VERY well animated and has so much more precision and detail (3-D effect, angels, etc) than the average cartoon today (cheap!).

I love Little Nemo, from the first day I played the NES game in the 80's growing up, to the cartoon movie I saw, up to this day. Love it love it love it!

[oracioroman]

utterly amazing. the type of thing that brings a tear to one's eye.