How a Mosquito Operates

How a Mosquito Operates (1912)

A hungry mosquito spots and follows a man on his way home. The mosquito slips into the room where the man is sleeping, and gets ready for a meal. His first attempts startle the man and wake him up, but the mosquito is very persistent.

Date of release
1912-01-01
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (67)
Runtime
6m
Genres
Animation, Comedy
Director
Winsor McCay

Interesting facts

How a Mosquito Operates is a 1912 silent animated short film by the American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short depicts a giant mosquito tormenting a sleeping man. The film is one of the earliest works of animation, and its technical quality is considered far ahead of its time. It is also known under the titles The Story of a Mosquito and Winsor McCay and his Jersey Skeeters.

Production and release

McCay began working on the film in May 1911. Shortly after, he left the employ of the New York Herald for the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst—a sign of his rising stardom. A magazine advertisement in July announced a "moving picture, containing six thousand sketches ... [that] will be a 'release' for vaudeville next season by Mr. McCay. The film will be named How a Mosquito Operates."

McCay made the 6 000 drawings on translucent rice paper. The film came before the development of cel animation, in which animators draw on clear sheets of celluloid and lay them over static backgrounds. Thus, on each drawing McCay had to redraw the background, which appears to waver slightly due to the difficulty of reproducing it perfectly each time.

McCay finished drawing the film in December 1911. A snowstorm hit when he was to have the drawings taken to Vitagraph Studios for photographing, so he hired an enclosed horse-drawn taxi to have them taken there. It disappeared, and a few days later the police found the abandoned taxi with the drawings unharmed inside, the horses two to three miles away.

How a Mosquito Operates debuted in January 1912 as part of McCay's vaudeville act, which he toured through that spring and summer. Film producer Carl Laemmle bought the distribution rights under the restriction that he not have the film shown in the US until McCay had finished using it in his vaudeville act.

In a lost live-action prologue, McCay and his daughter, "pestered to death by mosquitoes" at their summer home in New Jersey, find a professor who speaks the insects' language. The professor tells McCay to "make a series of drawings to illustrate just how the insect does its deadly work", and after months of work McCay invites the professor to watch the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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