Meeting McCay

The Winsor McCay Award

Kalamazoo Animation Festival International

Winsor McCay:  The Father of American Animation

When Disneyland was first opened in 1955, Walt Disney took Robert McCay, son of Spring Lake native Winsor McCay, on a guided tour.  He stopped near the end and said, "You know, this should really belong to your father."  Disney followed in the footsteps of animation pioneer Winsor McCay.

Winsor McCay was born Zenas Winsor McKay.  He was named after his father's employer and he quickly dropped Zenas in favor of Winsor.  The year and place of his birth is the subject of some conjecture.  His parents, Robert and Janet McKay, purchased land from Aloys Bilz in the late 1860’s and ran a grocery store, in Spring Lake, Michigan.  He stated that he was born September 26, 1871, in Spring Lake, and always considered this his hometown.  It is possible that he was born in 1867 on a trip to visit his mother’s family in East Zorra, Ontario.  His tombstone in Brooklyn, New York lists his birth date as 1869.  The records were burned during one of Spring Lake's frequent fires of the late 1800's, so we will never be sure.  He had a brother, Arthur and a sister, Mae, both younger than himself.

He was raised in Spring Lake where he commenced drawing at a prodigiously early age.  There are tales of young Winsor etching pictures into panes of glass discarded after one of the numerous sawmill fires, which occasionally raged through the village in the late nineteenth century.  In 1880, the Goodrich Steamship Alpena carrying passengers from nearby Grand Haven to Chicago was wrecked in a terrible storm.  The Alpena took 100 people to the bottom of Lake Michigan in what remains one of the worst maritime disasters in Great Lakes history.  At the age of 13, young “Winnie” drew a picture of the wreck on the school blackboard. It was photographed and copies were sold as postcards.  This school, Spring Lake Union School, was located on the site of the small park between the Spring Lake District Library and the Spring Lake Township Hall.  Parts of the foundation may still be seen there today. 

McCay's first major comic strip series was Tales of the Jungle Imps, by Felix Fiddle. Forty-three installments were published from January to November of 1903, in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The stories concerned jungle creatures and the ways that they adapted to a hostile world, with individual titles such as How the Elephant Got His Trunk and How the Ostrich Got So Tall.  

His strips Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend were both set in the dreams of their characters and featured fantasy art that attempted to capture the look and feel of dreams. McCay's cartoons always had a strong following because of his expressive graphic style. McCay also created a number of animated short films, in which every single frame of each cartoon (with each film requiring thousands of frames) was hand-drawn by McCay himself.

Laid out with exquisite detail in a manner that would only be matched during the heights of Walt Disney's cartoons of the 1930s, the star of McCay's 1914 groundbreaking animated film Gertie the Dinosaur is classified by film and animation historians as the first cartoon character created especially for film to display a unique, realistic "personality".  In the film, Gertie causes trouble and cries when she is scolded, and finally she gives McCay himself a ride on her back as he steps into the movie picture.

In addition to a series of cartoons based on his popular "rarebit" gags, McCay also created The Sinking of the Lusitania, a depiction of the attack on the maritime ship. The cartoon contained a message that was meant to inspire America into joining World War I.

McCay created the field of animation and towered over illustrators of his time, and is still hailed today as the “Father of Animation.”  The highest award that an animator at the annual “Annies” can receive is the Winsor McCay Award for Lifetime Achievement in Animation.  The list of recipients reads like a Who's Who of our popular culture.  Walter Lantz, who created Woody Woodpecker; Fritz Freling, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones who animated Bugs Bunny and friends; the Flintstone's Hanna and Barbera; and Mel Blanc, who did so many cartoon voices, are all past winners. McCay died July 26, 1934, and is buried in Brooklyn.

The library has a special collection of Winsor McCay materials, including books, movies, and other memorabilia dealing with McCay for those interested in the man and his profession.  The library plans to continue adding to its Winsor McCay collection as well as sponsor programs that feature McCay, illustration, and animation.  He was one of the foremost illustrators of all time, and is seen so by his peers today.  He created a film genre, motion picture cartoons, that had not existed before.  All animated film creators can trace their lineage to the works of Winsor McCay.  So Walt Disney may have been right, that the world of animation does owe a great deal to this famous Spring Laker.