Winsor McCay was an amazing illustrator with a great eye for perspective and volume, as showcased in his groundbreaking first animation. He seems to have made a point of having his characters and props tumble and turn in all directions through a white space, of which only a floor is occasionally indicated by the appearance of shadows. The dream theme of Nemo's adventures was well-known from his appearance in the comic pages of newspapers since 1905 and leads to some surprising effects in this film, such as the funhouse mirror sequence and Impie's entrance as several cylinders and slices that fall from the sky into his usual shape. Somewhat less successful is McCay's use of the stop trick that had been popularised by Georges Méliès (soon after 0:12 in the video), which turns out much less magical in animation than in most of the cinematographic examples.
Although some great (but short) animation loops had been created for stroboscopic discs and zoetropes since 1833, very little animation of high quality had been made since the invention of the movies, apart from lithographed films for toy magic lanterns (which were mostly traced from live-action footage). The initial appeal of the movies was the photographic detail that was almost impossible to create in drawn animation, so there was little incentive to get drawn motion pictures in cinema while cinematography was still a novelty. After Émile Cohl's 1908 breakthrough "Fantasmagorie" had proven that cinematic animation could be worthwhile, McCay's work really set a very high standard and can easily compete with most hand-drawn animation that has been done ever since (especially concerning "ligne claire" type animation, while especially Disney would work on getting more detail and shading in high quality colourful animation).
This animation was the centre piece of a 10 minute film entitled "Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics". The other 8 minutes involve McCay making a wager to produce 4000 drawings within 2 months and make them move, and some staged comical scenes about the process. This live-action story was directed by J. Stuart Blackton, who earlier made "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" (released in 1906 and regarded as the very first animation by some historians, but at best the first theatrically released animation on 35mm film).
The version presented here is sometimes said to have been hand-coloured by McCay himself, but according to other sources he paid to have his prints colored. Believing that the latter is correct, it is tempting to imagine that McCay himself would have worked a tiny bit more precise and would have managed to avoid the somewhat patchy, flickering elements that are quite visible when paying attention to such details. However, it seems hard to improve on this colouring job if one considers how small 35mm film frames actually are and how tedious it must be to colour 4000 of them.
In this video some cuts have been made to the repetitive footage that McCay looped back and forth in the original film. By doing so, he probably cheated a bit on his claim of having made 4000 drawings for the movie...
