Gertie the Dinosaur (13:51)
IMDb; TV Tropes; Wikipedia; YouTube

This was released in 1914. I first watched it on YouTube in 2014, which is pretty much the standard length of time between movies being released and my seeing them for the first time. But anyway, I had heard of it long before I saw it, or at least before I saw the whole short. I'm sure I'd seen at least a few seconds of it before, like in things that talked about the history of animation, or whatever. It's thought by many people to be the first animated film, but actually the cartoonist, Winsor McCay, had made a couple other animated shorts prior to this. And in fact people had been making animated short films as early as the 1890s, I guess. Still, this one is considered to be pretty revolutionary. It is, of course, a silent film, so there are title cards between scenes. And the film begins with live-action scenes of McCay and some other people, who stop into a museum and see a dinosaur skeleton, which he bets he can "bring to life." What he actually means by this is that he'll create an animation of a "dinosaurus," which he names Gertie.

Six months and 10,000 drawings later, he presents his animation to his friends. He interacts with it, sort of. I guess this is something he did in Vaudeville, but watching the film, we don't really see him "interact" with Gertie, we just read some title cards which are meant to be him talking to her, and in the animation she reacts to what he says, either following instructions or playfully ignoring them. At the end of the animated segment, McCay himself goes for a ride on Gertie... or at least a nondescript animated figure that's meant to be McCay goes for a ride. And so, back in the real world, he wins his bet.

Anyway, I found the live-action parts a bit boring (with the exception of one scene), but I found the animation itself fairly cute and amusing and fun to watch. It's naturally rather crude, by later standards, but really not bad. And I'm glad I finally saw it, because whether or not it's the first animated film, it's certainly an incredibly important part of the history of animation. And... its importance is a big part of why I've rated it as highly as I have, but it easily could have turned out to be something I found boring, and I didn't. I definitely liked it on its own merits, as well as its historical merits.