"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated July 26, 1908:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905; Guest Curated by @Totter87 (OCTOBER 21, 2020):
Hi there! Happy to have you for @WelcomeToSlumberland’s multi-part discussion of the July 26, 1908 episode of Little Nemo in Slumberland, the famous Walking Bed comic! - 1/25
This is @Totter87, and today I’m going to discuss this comics' animated legacy, my own efforts to animate the walking bed itself for my upcoming game, Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends, and what that experience has shown me about this comic. - 2/25
We begin with a familiar motif: Nemo is awoken by a Slumberlandian (Flip – in the bed!) and the bed sweeps him off to another adventure. That the bed gets up and starts walking is not itself remarkable here, but the way that McCay masterfully renders the bed’s journey is. - 3/25
This comic feels as though it’s part of a soft reboot of Little Nemo. McCay employs 15 frames, in 3 rows of 5, for this comic. Starting from the July 12 episode where Flip destroyed Slumberland, McCay uses higher frame counts to show motion and action heavy sequences. - 4/25
This hearkens back to the beginning of the comic when Nemo was trying to reach Slumberland. Unlike those comics, the arrangement of frames is less inventive, but it’s clear that McCay isn’t experimenting with the comic as he was in 1905, he’s experimenting with showing motion now. - 5/25
These comics read like what we know today as storyboards. In the case of the bed, we see a remarkably detailed exit from the house: the bed’s legs grow, it takes a few tentative steps, and gingerly walks out the door. - 6/25
From frame 7 onward, both McCay and the bed really get to *ahem* stretch their legs. - 7/25
Quickly, the bed reaches its full height and starts running and bucking wildly. It continues to grow, dwarfing carriages and even streetcars as it straddles them. Nemo and Flip are tossed around until finally gaining their composure for a trot across the city’s rooftops and a final tumble. - 8/25
The walking bed is possibly the most enduring image from McCay’s entire run on Little Nemo, finding its way into both Nemo and non-Nemo animated works in the 112 years since its publication. - 9/25
References include the 1989 Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland film, another on the cover of the 1992 Little Nemo video game (the bed is not in the game itself), the title sequence of the “Bert and Ernie’s Great Adventures” cartoons on Sesame Street, and even on Google! - 10/25
What many of these scenes avoid (and I don’t blame them) is recreating the entire motion of this scene, showing the bed at a relaxing trot usually before it flies off into the sky, but that motion shows a distinct trick of McCay’s influential in his animated work. [Use the Twitter gif function to find a gif of the flying bed from the movie] - 11/25
At this point, McCay would have been performing his vaudeville “chalk talk” acts for 2 years. As Canemaker points out, McCay spent a lot of his performing career proving to doubters that he was indeed drawing his magnificent characters without tracing. - 12/25
We see hints of this in McCay’s Little Nemo animated film, created 3 years after this comic, where he is explicitly shown drawing his characters, as to provide recorded evidence. Another mechanism that McCay employed to prove his skill, though, was drawing extinct or fantasy creatures. - 13/25
Canemaker describes McCay’s choice of a dinosaur as his film’s subject partially as a means of proving his doubters wrong by drawing something that didn’t exist anymore. To understand how Gertie would move, McCay recreated the motion of performing elephants. - 14/25
We can’t know if this is the case with the walking bed, but we do see a similar technique here, recreating the motion of horses with a fantastic creature. - 15/25
As an animator myself, I knew that recreating the walking bed would be an important part of creating a link to McCay’s original vision for the game (it was the first piece of concept art that I drew). - 16/25
It’s clear from the pose on the bed in frames 7 and 8 that McCay is modeling the bed’s movement on that of a horse, possibly even using the popular works of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a reference. - 17/25
A pioneer of photography, Eadweard Muybridge used a series of cameras to capture the movement of humans and animals in motion. His first study was a means to find whether horses ever had all 4 feet of the ground while running, but became a series of important art references. - 18/25
McCay would have likely had access to Muybridge’s popular and widely printed photographs, which were released in magazines, as cabinet cards, and even as disks to be viewed on an early animation device invented buy Muybridge, the zoopraxiscope. - 19/25
In an effort to animate McCay’s walking bed, I went to Muybridge’s photographs to draft the bed’s motion. Since the bed’s long legs made a 1:1 translation difficult, I made a simple 3D version of the bed and posed it to see how the horse motion would translate to the spindly legs. - 20/25
While McCay’s work was created in 1908, it was techniques created well after, including Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation, which helped bring the gallop to life. I posed the bed according to Muybridge to create the key poses of the run, then traced over them. - 21/25
In the original, Nemo and Flip tumble back and forth on the bed as it moves. To accomplish this, I used straight ahead animation, where you draw each frame individually in order; great for drawing objects physically reacting to each other. - 22/25
In our version, Nemo and our original character, Peony, hang on for dear life, reacting to the bed’s run and providing a sense of physical follow-through. - 23/25
Having animated this, I can tell you that this combination of movements: a realistic horse gallop translated to an imaginary “creature” and characters tumbling on top is a significant challenge and I can see why straight translations of this scene are uncommon. - 24/25
That these dizzying movements read so well in McCay’s original seminal comic is a testament to his skill at depicting sequential motion. It also predicts techniques that wouldn’t be formalized until the 1930’s. It is no wonder then, that this comic holds such esteem. - 25/25