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Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He first used the film before audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act: the frisky, childlike dinosaur Gertie did tricks at his command. His employer, magnate William Randolph Hearst, later curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release. Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops, and the first to feature a dinosaur. Gertie influenced the next generation of animators, including the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, and Walt Disney. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour, around 1921 after producing about a minute of footage. Gertie is the best preserved of his films—others are lost or in fragments—and has been preserved in the US National Film Registry. (Full article...)