Winsor McCay Centaurs
Winsor McCay was the creator of the surrealist newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, a beautiful, eye-opening classic that ran from 1905 to 1914 and has influenced me not a little. It can be had in glorious full-color reprints from los eeenternets for colossal amounts of money, or, the way I got it, from la biblioteca. A few strips are available online, like this great one from wikimedia commons. Ray Bradbury did a film adaptation in the ’90s, and there was an 8-bit Nintendo game I rented once when I was 11….
But anyway. Here, courtesy of Paul DiFillipo, is a little-known animation fragment McCay did, featuring some centaurs frolicking in a forest to tasteful piano music:
[Inferior4+1]: Winsor McCay’s Centaurs
Note the well-endowed female centaur, and then note the comment below from John Crowley about the apocryphality of said endowedness, being as how there were no female centaurs in greek myth. Woo Crowley!
Predictably, my favorite part comes around the 0:44 mark, when the strapping young male centaur heartthrob, for no apparent reason, throws a rock at a passing albatross and kills it.
posted by mjd 
in Art, Centaurs, Film | 3 Comments »
This reminds me to ask you whether you’ve read this centaur story by Lord Dunsany: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/tbow/tbow03.htm. Because the centaur who killed that albatross may be the same centaur in this story, I think.
I have not…but I will! Thank you.
That is crazy. It’s like a Lord Dunsany Lovecraft story. Shepperalk can not be stopped, and the story has no interest in the possibility. And he ruts to his doom!