Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

2. Winsor McCay's Warped Spaces

45 2 WINSOR MCCAY’S WARPED SPACES An oft-repeated anecdote of early film history recounts how audience members at the Lumière brothers’ first screening of their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) recoiled in fear as the train moved from deep background toward the foreground and eventually off the frame, as if expecting the mechanism to emerge from the screen and enter into their world. It is a story that, though perhaps spurious,1 has been so frequently recounted precisely because it suggests the sort of phenomenal power of those first projected images, while also hinting at the new cinematic mechanism’s ability to suture—somewhat disturbingly—two different sorts of space, the reproduced world of cinematic space and the real world of human experience. I recall this anecdote because of its curious parallel in animation history, as Winsor McCay reversed this fear-inducing effect with his famed vaudeville piece Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).2 Accompanying his cartoon, McCay presents himself as the trainer of his animated dinosaur and, at the act’s conclusion, appears to walk into the cartoon’s space, there to be taken up by Gertie and move off into the deep background, perched atop her head. Of course, that movement from offscreen space into the depth of the filmed world, into animating space, was apparently meant for a different effect, one of amusement and awe rather than fear, thanks to the manner in which it pointedly toys with reality, emphasizing the skills of the showmananimator and the constructed nature of the filmic space. And yet it is an effect that, I suggest, still carries its own weight of anxiety because of the modernist attitude toward space that it demonstrates—an attitude that, as the previous chapters have suggested, represents an important legacy for the animated cartoon. Animating Space 46 Much of the critical discussion surrounding the early history of animation has recently come to focus on its shifting relationship to the avant-garde; there has been a particular emphasis on how the early cartoon especially, with its essentially flat, fluid, and even reflexive characteristics , was often perceived as effecting the same sort of challenge to the status quo as did much of modernist art. Esther Leslie typifies this approach as she compares early developments in animation to an avantgarde movement that typically “takes fragmentation and disintegration into its law of form, making clear how constructed not only it is but also the social world—ripe for transformation” (122). And following this same focus on animation’s ideological implications, Paul Wells reminds us of how the “positioning of animated films” and, by implication, of animation itself as “merely populist texts” has “proved to be inhibiting in properly acknowledging its omnipresent significance as a potentially radical art form” (1). That emphasis on formal parallels between animation and avant-garde art in terms of both technique and political intention, though, has tended to gloss over the nature of some of those connections, particularly the manner in which early animation addresses one of its most fundamental properties, the space that the animator or cartoonist must fill up or leave empty,3 the animating space that through his or her own creative efforts the animator must, as McCay seemingly does in Gertie the Dinosaur, almost literally enter. I suggest that when Winsor McCay “enters” the animated world of Gertie in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Winsor McCay’s Warped Spaces 47 we look more closely at how McCay’s films engage with space, we can see another dimension of that modernist spirit at work, for we find that his work implicates an assault not simply on the social status quo, but also on what we might term the phenomenological status quo, that is, on both the organization of and the audience’s experience of space itself. As we have previously observed, Anthony Vidler, in his study of space, culture, and architecture in the early modern era, provides us with an important lead in this direction. He notes that the turn of the century introduced, along with its insights into psychology and culture, a new sense of space that he terms “warped space,” and he suggests that this development was so crucial that we might well think of it as the key leitmotiv of modernity (Warped 5). Drawing on the work of Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Simmel, he describes how the new urban world— that which...