How A Mosquito Operates - Background

Background

Winsor McCay (c. 1869–1934) developed prodigiously detailed and accurate drawing skills early in life. He earned a living as a young man drawing portraits and posters in dime museums, and drew large crowds with his ability to draw quickly in public. He began working as a newspaper illustrator full-time in 1898, and in 1903 began drawing comic strips. His greatest comic-strip success was the children's fantasy Little Nemo in Slumberland, which he launched in 1905. In 1906, McCay began performing on the vaudeville circuit, doing chalk talks—performances in which he drew before live audiences.

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. McCay made four thousand drawings on rice paper for his first animated short, which starred his Little Nemo characters. The Little Nemo film debuted in movie theatres in 1911, and McCay soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act.

How a Mosquito Operates was McCay's second film. The animated sequences in Little Nemo had no plot; they were preceded with a live-action sequence in which he makes a bet with his colleagues that he can make his Nemo characters move. In the main sequence of How a Mosquito Operates, McCay himself does not appear. As he had already demonstrated that pictures could be made to move in his first film, in the second he focuses on a story, albeit a simple one.

Much like the early experiments in animation of French animator Émile Cohl (1857–1938), McCay used the Nemo film to show the capabilities of the medium, with fanciful sequences demonstrating motion for its own sake. In Mosquito, McCay wanted to demonstrate greater believability. He balanced the outlandish action with naturalistic timing, motion, and weight; the heavier the mosquito becomes, the more difficulty it has keeping its balance. McCay gave character to the mosquito; it is egotistical, persistent, and calculating.

McCay put the film together in December 1911 and released it in January 1912, first as part of his vaudeville act, and later in movie theaters. It was distributed to foreign theaters by Vitagraph Studios; within the United States, McCay showed the film as he toured his act in the spring and summer. In a now-lost live-action prologue, McCay and his daughter vacation in New Jersey at their summer home. There, they "are pestered to death by mosquitoes". McCay finds a professor who speaks the insects' language who tells him to "make a series of drawings to illustrate just how the insect does its deadly work". Months later, McCay invites the professor to watch the film.

Vaudeville acts and humor magazines commonly joked about the large New Jersey mosquitoes, or "Jersey Skeeters", and McCay had frequently used mosquitoes in his comic strip, including an episode of Little Nemo in which Nemo is attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes after returning from a trip to Mars. The idea for the film was taken from a June 5, 1909, episode of McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip. In the original, the mosquito (without top hat or briefcase) gorges itself on an alcoholic; in the end, the mosquito itself becomes so drunk it isn't able to fly away.