The Centaurs (1921)
Only about ninety seconds of Winsor McCay's mythological cartoon survive today: a young centaur gathering flowers, a male centaur felling an eagle with a thrown rock, a pair of elders greeting the herd, and a boy centaur capering among them.
The Centaurs was one of several ambitious personal projects Winsor McCay — the pioneering animator behind Gertie the Dinosaur and The Sinking of the Lusitania — worked on intermittently for years without finishing; its sole surviving nitrate print later disintegrated in storage, leaving only this fragment of what was planned as a mythological epic.
Background
The Centaurs is a 1921 animated film by Winsor McCay, the cartoonist who created Little Nemo in Slumberland and the early animated character Gertie the Dinosaur. Only about ninety seconds of the mythological cartoon survive. The surviving footage shows a young centaur gathering flowers, a male centaur felling an eagle with a thrown rock, a pair of elders greeting the herd, and a boy centaur capering among them. McCay drew his animation by hand, a labour-intensive method he used across his films, and the fragment is an important record of his work.
What to watch for
Pay attention to the surviving scenes, which show McCay drawing figures with a classical, mythological setting. The animation is more elaborate than the simple gags of his earlier short films, and the eagle sequence gives the fragment its most dramatic moment. Because the film is incomplete, the viewer sees only a piece of McCay’s intended work, which makes every surviving frame important to film historians. The style sits closer to his comic illustration than to later studio animation, and the figures are drawn with the same care that marks his newspaper strips.
