The Unsettling Allure of Winsor McCay
Note: This is the sixty-seventh in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my second favorite 1912 film, HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES, directed by Winsor McCay.
HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES (1912) is a sick, sick film. That disgusting sucker terrorizes a strange man and gets all fat and kills himself because he explodes from getting too much blood out of that dude’s face. And it’s all rendered in an animation style that was incredibly ahead of its time, and even in hindsight, it has a strange blend of natural and stylized motion that imparts a feeling of the uncanny valley.
Winsor McCay had broken onto the film scene with the landmark animated movie LITTLE NEMO (1911), based on his delirious comic strip of the same name. It displayed tremendous, plot-less character animation preceded by a relatively unimpressive live action sequence that celebrated McCay’s talent. Almost thankfully, HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES is missing its live action sequence that, once again, finds McCay’s braggadocio getting him into a bet that he can make an animated film, this time of 6,000 drawings versus the 4,000 of LITTLE NEMO.
And that makes sense, since HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES’ entire six minute run time is animated, while LITTLE NEMO’s final two or three minutes makes up the film’s whole pioneering aspect. HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES, on the other hand, was entirely unique in the world of animation in that it provided a plot and world of its own. It wasn’t explicitly experimental, like even earlier films such as FANTASMAGORIE (1908).
HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES, as I loosely mentioned, follows a man who’s trying to sleep while a massive mosquito, complete with top hat and suitcase, gets its fill (and more) of human blood from his face. It’s actually based on a 1909 strip from McCay’s other popular and influential strip, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Without intertitles or the dialogue of that original strip, though, the film feels even more bizarre and otherworldly. The mosquito’s suitcase contains a grinding stone he uses to whet his sucker, which is plunged into the man’s face too easily. Speaking of the the bald, heavyset man’s face: it’s incredibly detailed. It’s certainly the most realistic illustration film had ever seen, and that’s unsettling. But even more upsetting is the shaping of the mosquito’s “stomach” as he feasts. It doesn’t necessarily swell so much as…fill out in a rapid, tallying motion that gave me chills. I’m not exaggerating. I felt very ill at ease watching the motion.
And that feeling permeates the whole film. It’s an uncanny feeling. The film is primitive, but it certainly exists within the realm of the uncanny valley, which refers to the sense of repulsion or unease that a facsimile, in being so similar to real images or motion, can instill in a human. In fact, this feeling is present in almost all of McCay’s work, especially in a personal favorite, THE CENTAURS (1921). GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914), McCay’s most famous film, actually avoids this for the most part, since the titular subject can’t truly be referenced in real life. Gertie is also a little more cartoonish in design.
In any event, you might find yourself in the uncanny valley if you watch HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES. The motion of the mosquito and man are natural, in the great McCay tradition, but it also takes somewhat of a step backward from LITTLE NEMO in that it includes strange looping animations that lead the characters to step back and forth numerous times before carrying out their next action. Even still, the moments in between those loops may be improved on the motion of the characters of LITTLE NEMO. It’s hard to tell with the strange departure from the otherwise impressive natural animation. It’s not quite clear why this is (perhaps to pad the run time or impart a sense of rhythm), but what HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES has over LITTLE NEMO is the design of its characters. They bring home the strangeness proposed by LITTLE NEMO, and are set in an actual scenario that, even in the mundane world, can cause some disgust. HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES is a landmark not only in technical animation, but also in the framing of an animated world. The omission of the live action framing may solidify this reading, but even still, the animated portion itself carries a story, a story that holds its weight because of the tremendous execution of its visual premise.
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