the French Émile Cohl. McCay's first film starred his Little Nemo characters and debuted in movie theatres in 1911; he soon incorporated it into his vaudeville act. He followed it in 1912 with How a Mosquito Operates, in which a giant, naturalistically animated mosquito sucks the blood of a sleeping man. McCay gave the mosquito a personality and balanced humor with the horror of the nightmare situation. His animation was criticized as being so lifelike that he must have traced the characters from photographs or resorted to tricks using wires; to show that he had not, McCay chose for his next film a creature that could not have been photographed. McCay conferred with the American Historical Society in 1912 and announced plans for "the presentation of pictures showing the great monsters that used to inhabit the earth". He spoke of the "serious and educational work" that the animation process could enable. McCay had earlier introduced dinosaurs into his comic strip work, such as a March 4, 1905, episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which a Brontosaurus skeleton took part in a horse race, and a May 25, 1913, Rarebit Fiend episode in which a hunter unsuccessfully targets a dinosaur; the layout of the background to the latter bore a strong resemblance to what later appeared in Gertie. In the September 21, 1913, episode of McCay's Little Nemo strip In the Land of Wonderful Dreams, titled "In the Land of the Antediluvians", Nemo meets a blue dinosaur named Bessie which has the same design as that of Gertie. McCay considered a number of names before settling on "Gertie"; his production notebooks used "Jessie the ". Disney animator Paul Satterfield recalled hearing McCay in 1915 relate how he had chosen the name "Gertie": Content Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur. Its star Gertie does tricks much like a trained elephant. She is animated in a naturalistic style unprecedented for the time; she breathes rhythmically, she shifts her weight as she moves, and her abdominal muscles undulate as she draws water. McCay imbued her with a personality—while friendly, she could be capricious, ignoring or rebelling against her master's commands. Synopsis When her master McCay calls her, the frisky, childlike Gertie appears from a cave. Her whip-wielding master has her do tricks such as raising her foot or bowing on command. When she feels she has