[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Gertie_The_Dinosaur_small_3750.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:300:"Gertie will now show that she isn't afraid of me and take me for a ride."]]

A groundbreaking [[UsefulNotes/TheSilentAgeOfAnimation 1914]] theatrical short subject from the mind of ''ComicStrip/LittleNemo'' creator Creator/WinsorMcCay, ''Gertie the Dinosaur'' is a landmark short in personality animation, influencing many artists and future animation pioneers, including Creator/OttoMessmer, [[Creator/VanBeurenStudios Paul]] [[Creator/{{Terrytoons}} Terry]] and Creator/WaltDisney.

The short (well, the non-{{vaudeville}} version) starts off with Winsor visiting the Natural History Museum in New York with several of his fellow cartoonists, making a bet that he can "[[WeDoTheImpossible make the dinosaurs live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons]]." Winsor and his assistants promptly begin work on the cartoon, showing it to the cartoonists six months later. The animation then shows Gertie herself, going about activities such as eating a pumpkin that Winsor throws to her, or throwing a woolly mammoth into a nearby lake (he counters by squirting her, which she doesn't take well).

The reason for the cartoon being made spawned from criticism of Winsor's earlier shorts ''Little Nemo'' and ''How a Mosquito Operates'', with skeptical audience members (wrongly) accusing him that he traced off of live-action footage to animate the human characters -- so Winsor proceeded to push his mastery of perspective and mass to the limits and created something that you ''couldn't'' get from live action. And boy, did he succeed.

The cartoon came in two versions: the full version with Winsor appearing in a live-action opening, and the roadshow version which only has the Gertie footage. One studio even created their own unauthorized knockoff of the film!

See the full, unabridged version of the cartoon, in two parts, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnuhP2URCoo&playnext=1&list=PL8F5D4105D2798B77 here]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixK1DffOsbE here]].

Gertie was to receive a sequel short called ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36gqBoUSJ4M Gertie on Tour]]'', but it was ultimately left unfinished, and sadly only a fragment of it has survived, barely lasting over a minute.

Ride/WaltDisneyWorld has also made a little tribute to Gertie, via a [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/blergy/4389431669/ life-sized replica of her]] serving as an ice cream parlor in Disney's Hollywood Studios.
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!!''Gertie the Dinosaur'' provides examples of the following tropes:
* BlackHoleBelly: Gertie swallows a tree as large as herself and tops it off by drinking down an entire lake, but her size doesn't increase.
* DomesticatedDinosaurs: Gertie is essentially a sauropod that acts like a trained elephant.
* EscalatingWar: At one point a woolly mammoth, named "Jumbo" by the captions, gets in front of the screen. An annoyed Gertie throws him into the sea. Jumbo responds by hosing her with water from his trunk. Gertie throws a rock at him in retaliation.
* ExtremeOmnivore: Gertie eats a pumpkin, a tree (roots and all) bigger than she is, and a rock. She also sucks a lake completely dry.
* FramingDevice: As 1914 moviegoers hadn't seen a lot of cartoons, the short begins with a brief summation of the process by which the cartoon was drafted and created.
* GentleGiantSauropod: Gertie is a very gentle sauropod who obeys [=McCay=]'s commands and even allows him to ride her. That said, she has a little bit of a [[ThePrankster mischievous]] streak, like tossing a wooly mammoth in a lake just for her own amusement.
* GiantFlyer: A four-winged, dragon-like monster flies by and startles Gertie.
* HollywoodPrehistory: Gertie lives in a landscape of barren rocks inhabited by herself, a woolly mammoth, and assorted {{Prehistoric Monster}}s more similar to medieval dragons than anything else.
* LimitedAnimation: Played straight in that there are enough repeat drawings and loops that it borders on an OverlyLongGag, but subverted in that the background had to be redrawn for each frame, as the concept of transparent cels used for animation had not yet been realized.
* LineBoil: Constant shifting of contour lines is evident on the background, which had to be retraced on every frame. [=McCay=] felt it made the whole image seem alive.
* RogerRabbitEffect: Possibly the earliest example -- Winsor himself actually appears on-screen with Gertie. The vaudeville show also took this [[LogicalExtreme about as far as it could go]] -- that is, Winsor himself, ''live on stage'', interacting with the cartoon.
* SeaSerpents: A sea serpent emerges from the lake and irritates Gertie early in the animation.
* SitcomArchNemesis: Gertie gets into a short war with a woolly mammoth, Jumbo. Both the captions and the roadshow presenter would scold Gertie like a parent would a child picking on their sibling.
* StockFootage: Numerous frames are repeated in the animation part.
* TropeMaker: For ''animation as a whole''. Animated cartoons had been made before then, but Gertie was the very first animated cartoon character with a distinct personality. "Gertie" was also (says Website/TheOtherWiki) "the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops."
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