Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 29, 2017

Little Nemo (1911) is a silent animated short film, the first by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. One of the earliest animated films, it features characters from his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. The film's expressive character animation distinguished it from the earlier experiments of animators such as James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl. McCay, inspired by flip books his son brought home, came to see the potential of the animated film medium. The short's four thousand drawings on rice paper were shot at Vitagraph Studios under Blackton's supervision. Most of the film is a live-action sequence in which McCay bets his colleagues that he can make drawings that move. He wins the bet with four minutes of animation in which the characters perform, interact, and metamorphose to McCay's whim. After the film debuted, he began using it in his vaudeville act. The film's enthusiastic reception motivated him to hand-color each of the animated frames of the originally black-and-white film. Its success led him to create more animated films, including How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and his best-known film, Gertie the Dinosaur, in 1914.