100 years ago today, American cartoonist
Winsor McCay released the first long-form animation film, the Sinking of the Lusitania. Far from being funny, the 12-minute film depicted the huge British steam liner carrying 2,000 passengers when it was torpedoed by a German submarine. The originator of animated cartoons was frustrated when his media bosses, the Hearst empire, downplayed the incident in its newspapers, because they wanted America to stay out of World War I. So McCay spent all his spare hours producing a the film, which took him 22 months to create, to tell the tale of the most "dastardly, cowardly act.” 25,000 drawings were sketched and photographed for the musical animation which used the latest cel technology.
WATCH 8-mins of the film... (1918)
