The Sinking of the Lusitania



Having virtually established animation as a viable medium through films such as Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay produced the propaganda short The Sinking of the Lusitania (combining animation, editorial cartoon and live-action documentary techniques) to stir Americans into action after a German submarine sank the British liner RMS Lusitania in 1915, killing 1,198 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans. McCay was upset with the isolationist sentiment present in the country and at his employer, the Hearst newspapers chain.

It took McCay nearly two years working on his own to produce the film, debuting a year after America entered the war. Nevertheless, this is a significant film historically and a notable early example of animation being used for a purpose other than comedy. In his seminal American Silent Film, William K. Everson called the film "a wartime film that was both anti-German propaganda and an attempt to provide a documentary reconstruction of a major news event not covered by regular newsreel cameramen. The incredibly detailed drawings of the Lusitania, intercut with inserts of newspaper headlines relative to the notable victims, and strongly-worded editorializing sub-titles concerning the bestiality of the Hun, make this a fascinating and seldom-repeated experiment."

The Sinking of the Lusitania was added to the National Film Registry in 2017.

Watch it at archive.org