“Gertie the Dinosaur” follows the style of the early cinema (also known as primitive cinema), which had a static camera where all the actions is played out in a very frontal style (“Frankenstein”, J. Searle Dawley, 1909), not unlike traditional theatre. An interesting point is that since McCay didn’t use cels in this short, and therefore had to redraw everything on screen on each frame, he had no restraints keeping him from creating a simulated camera movement, but he kept to the presentational style of primitive cinema. It is also interesting that the world he constructed is three dimensional many of the actions taking place along the Z-axis (in the depth of field). As with silent movies of that time, McCay uses black slides with white text as intertitles, to do the dialogue.
While “Gertie the Dinosaur” follows the style of early cinema, “The Sinking of Lusitania” is stylized as a documentary, and it is using intertitles in between the animated sequences as a narration to what is happening. It is an early example of virtual cinematography. McCay uses animation as a medium to recreate a historic event where a German submarine attacks an American ship. The animated short places a virtual camera in positions where it would be impossible for real camera to be. Most notably is the scene where the virtual camera is looking out from a window of the ship while it “records” the torpedo coming towards it, but also in more subtitle ways like when the submarine is passing underneath it.
Both these examples shows that animation from its early days has been used as a medium to construct “reality”, that is was used to depict elements, actions and effects that cinema could not. Noteworthy is that they are both following the narrative style of their live-action counterparts.
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