Little Nemo (1911) aka Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics

[from Wikipedia] Little Nemo, also known as Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, is a 1911 animated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. One of the earliest animated films, it was McCays first, and adapted charers from McCays comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.\r
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Inspired by the flip books his son brought home, McCay came to see the possibility of making moving pictures of his cartoons. He claimed that he was the first man in the world to make animated cartoons, though he was preceded by James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl. Little Nemos charer animation set it apart from the earlier films of Blackton and Cohl. McCay made four thousand drawings on rice paper for the short, which were shot at Vitagraph Studios under Blacktons supervision. Most of the films running time is made up of a live-ion sequence in which McCay bets his colleagues that he can make drawings that move. Little Nemo debuted intheatres on April 8, 1911, and four days later McCay began using it as part of his vaudeville . Its good reception motivated him to hand-color each of the frames of the originally black-and-white film.\r
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The films success led McCay to devote more time to animation. He followed up Little Nemo with How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and his best-known film Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914.