Comparing Winsor Mccay And Max Fleischer

The Silent Era of art animation is considered to be a very important time for film animation. During this time, it was a bit more complicated than the current day. Individual pictures had to be drawn and put together one by one. Although there are many amazing animators from that era, we will be focusing on just two. Winsor McCay and Max Fleischer are men who produced amazing works and are important contributors to the history of animation. They each had their own unique style and were excellent at what they did. I personally would consider Max Fleischer to be one of my more favorite Silent Era animators. Although Winsor McCay had a great animating style, awesome ethics, and strong motivation for his work, I do think that Max Fleischer had
Max Fleischer and Winsor McCay are huge contributors to the animation world considered that they were the creators/finders of many techniques and devices that are still widely used today. Max Fleischer was the creator of the Rotoscope which is a specific system that animators used which involved tracing frames of the live action film frame which would then skip to the next. Winsor McCay on the other hand was the founder of the use of tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and the action of cycling drawings to show repetitive movements such as a dog wagging its tail. Winsor McCay had a nice elegant style to his works. He created pieces that looked natural and moved smoothly forming a real appearance to his art. His pieces such as Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur are just two examples of animations that demonstrate his graceful art style and are ones that really got him noticed in the film animation world. Max Fleischer’s animations were great in the fact that he created mini humorous stories that people could follow. One example of his work that demonstrated this is Koko’s Earth Control. This cartoon animation was great because he created a very humorous short story line for people to follow. His works were different in the fact that he created very funny plots compared to the majority of other
Since Winsor McCay is older than Max Fleischer and from a different generation, each men have their own distinct style/ethics and it can be seen through their art and lifestyles. In a way, I feel that their art animations show their age or generation they were in. Winsor McCay has always been involved in drawing and painting throughout his life, and I feel that his overall story of his past jobs and struggles is a big positive in his image seeing how far he got. McCay seemed to be a more genuine person overall compared to what I know about Max. Unlike Max Fleischer, Winsor McCay didn’t see a need or want to patent his findings and inventions, he wanted it to be available for the world to use and seen it as a gift to the people. It was said that when the Fleischer’s released Betty Boop and started making animated cartoons more commercialized and like a business, Winsor McCay got mad. Although there were some restrictions put on his Winsor McCay’s Vaudeville animation career by William Hearst (boss at New York American/ Hearst newspaper), McCay still pressed on and produced animations on his own. If people use Winsor McCay’s motivation as a learning lesson in life, it may help them overcome obstacles that probably would’ve never thought they could have