The Sinking of the Lusitania

The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) is one of the earliest and most ambitious animated documentaries. The 1915 torpedoing of the British ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine, with heavy civilian loss of life, had no motion-picture record; McCay set out to create one through animation, reconstructing the disaster he could not film. The result is a somber, dramatic work that used the cartoonist's tools not for comedy but for reportage and, unmistakably, wartime propaganda.

The film was a monumental undertaking, requiring an immense number of hand-drawn images and years of labor, and it is often cited as a milestone in serious animation. Its imagery—the great ship listing, smoke rising, figures in the water—demonstrated that the animated medium could address grave, real-world subjects with emotional force. Here McCay expanded the vocabulary of animation beyond playful characters like Gertie, proving it could serve history, argument, and grief. It remains a striking demonstration of how a comic-strip artist's craft could be turned toward one of the great public tragedies of the age.