Animation Legend: Winsor Mccay; The Cameraman's Revenge

Of interest primarily to film buffs, Animator Legend: Winsor McCay contains all of the early 20th-century artist's existing work (1911-1921) transferred from archival 35mm prints. Opening with McCay's maiden effort, the beautifully hand-colored Little Nemo (the inspiration for the 1992 animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland), the collection also includes McCay's best known piece Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), and the grotesque and funny parable of greed How a Mosquito Operates (1912)--which may have been the model for Bruno Bozetti's contemporary cartoon classic Self Service. Two other notables are The Flying House, in which a couple bogged down with high mortgage payments hit upon a unique way to solve their financial problems (by turning their house into an airplane, of sorts) and The Pet (1921), from McCay's Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend cycle, in which a pet dog grows in direct proportion to the amount he eats, moving from puppy chow nuggets to huge municipal chunks. One can't help but notice the similarity between the giant dog's attack on the city and that of another overgrown mammal some 12 years later--Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation classic King Kong. However, attention spans being what they are today, McCay's very leisurely paced comparatively primitive animated antics are likely to appeal mainly to serious cinema fans.The Cameraman's Revenge, on the other hand, while still mostly of interest to film buffs, offers some of the finest stop-motion puppet animation ever lensed, period. The title piece in this collection by Russian animator Ladislaw Starewicz (whose work is also on display in Early Russian Cinema, Vol. 3: Starewicz' Fantasies, reviewed in our April 1993 issue) is a clever fable about insect adultery that is both nicely filmed and admirably plotted. Frogland (1922) offers up a humorous political allegory about the dangers of asking for better leaders, while The Voice of the Nightingale (1923) is a beautifully hand-colored live-action/stop-motion animation piece about a young girl who tends a wounded bird. But the masterwork here is the brilliant The Mascot (1933), a darkly funny dream tale in which a young girl's toys come to life and have a hellish adventure in the metropolis. The nightmarish images of chicken skeletons and vegetables flying in a pot are amazing and may remind viewers of Tim Burton's recent The Nightmare Before Christmas. Also included are The Insect's Christmas (1913) and Winter Carousel (1958), a pair of shorts more notable for their craft than their story value.Animation Legend: Winsor McCay is recommended, and The Cameraman's Revenge & Other Tales is highly recommended for libraries with large film history collections and for universities with cinema studies programs. (R. Pitman)[DVD Review--January 25, 2005--Image, 80 min., not rated, $19.99--Making its second appearance on DVD, The Cameraman's Revenge & Other Fantastic Tales boasts a fine full screen transfer (in its original aspect ratio, with a crisp and clear image, although sometimes showing the ravages of age in the originals) and a fine Dolby Digital mono soundtrack, but no extras. Bottom line: a shoe-in for academic collections, this is also highly recommended for larger public library collections.]