 Animator and McCay biographer John Canemaker produced a film in 1974 called Remembering Winsor McCay , narrated by McCay 's animation assistant John Fitzsimmons . Canemaker helped coordinate the first retrospective of McCay 's films at the third International Animation Film Festival in 1975 in New York , which led to a film show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in winter 1975 – 76 . Canemaker also wrote a biography in 1987 called Winsor McCay : His Life and Art . In 2005 , a revised and expanded version of the biography was released , which comics scholar Jeet Heer called " far and away the most scholarly and intelligent biography ever written about an American cartoonist " . Animation scholar Paul Wells stated , " McCay 's influence on the history of animation cannot be understated " . Film critic Richard Eder lamented that as an animation pioneer McCay was not able to reach the potential suggested by his work . Eder compared McCay to the Italian primitives of the early Renaissance , highly skilled " in the limited techniques they could command " . Heer wrote that McCay 's strength was in his visuals , but that his writing and characters were weak . 
