It has been a little while since I posted a video, so here is a classic. Gertie the Dinosaur filmed in 1914 by Winsor McCay.

According to Wikipedia:

In creating the film, McCay came up with a number of techniques that would later become standard in the animation industry. He used registration marks to keep the background aligned from frame to frame, so that it did not appear to “swim”, as often happened in early cartoons. He avoided some repetitious work by re-using drawings, in what would later be called cycling. He devised what he called the “McCay Split System”, the first occurrence of keyframe animation. Rather than draw each frame in sequence, he would start by drawing Gertie’s key poses, and then go back and fill in the frames between. McCay was also very concerned with accurate timing and motion; he timed his own breathing to determine how to animate Gertie’s breathing, and included subtle details such as the ground sagging beneath Gertie’s great weight.

I first saw this film as a young boy. I believe it was on Sesame Street. It is one of those films that has stayed with me all these years and I find it just as magical now as those early theater go-ers (sp?) must have found it.