The Centaurs (1921)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

"The Centaurs" is a really short film from 1921 and this was a very strong year for American animation pioneer Winsor McCay. This is a film from 95 years ago, so it is of course still black-and-white and silent. It runs for under 3 minutes. We see mother centaur and father centaur and their daughter and we witness the latter fall in love with a young male centaur. He meets her family and not much later, there is also already the first baby. A happy little family I guess. The story is nothing too deep or interesting, but here it's all about McCay bringing mythical characters to life. And that's where the film succeeds. And we need to keep in mind that people back then were not spoiled yet with this super-modern mind-blowing animation as we are today. What we see in Pixar these days is what they saw in films like this one back then and that's perfectly fine. Still, because of the too simple story I still would say that this one is really only worth seeing for everybody who loves black-and-white silent films. Everybody else can skip it.

The Centaurs (1921)This Winsor McCay short is certainly worth watching if you're a fan of his work but sadly it's only available in fragments as some of the footage has been lost over time. What we basically have are some examples of a centaurs family (half human, half horse creatures) as they walk around in the woods. Again, since the film is incomplete it's hard to know exactly what McCay was going for but there's enough footage here to at least get a good idea of what the animation was like. I thought all of the creatures looked extremely good and I thought McCay did a nice job with the style of their bodies and how the human aspect of them were added in. I also thought the background work was pretty impressive and especially early on when we see one of the creatures walking through the woods. With that said, the one thing I thought was lacking was the quality of bringing the creatures to life and making you feel as if they're real. This is something shown in McCay's earlier work but it is missing here.

This is a very pretty cartoon to watch, as the centaurs move gracefully and are drawn in a sort of romanticized Art Nouveau-style. It was also interesting and says a lot about the sensibilities of the day that the female centaurs had breasts--not super well-defined ones, but they were indeed topless. This makes sense for a centaur, I know, but is something you never would have seen a few years later! A pretty young female centaur and male centaur meet and fall in love. The mother centaur seems wistful about this but in the end after years have passed, the two lovers come to see grandma and grandpa centaur with their own young centaur and all are happy. Not much of a plot, I admit, but a pretty bit of animation.

The surviving fragment of "The Centaurs" shows it to be an unusual and detailed piece of animation by Winsor McCay. The creatures and the backgrounds are drawn with considerable care and interesting detail that would almost have made it worth looking at even if there weren't any action.The half-human, half-horse centaur is one of the most popular of the fantastic creatures from mythology, and McCay's depiction of them works almost as well as any computer- generated image could. The two parts of the creatures fit together well, with the human part giving them personality and the horse part giving them a stylish appearance. The woods, hills, and meadows are also drawn very nicely.What exists of the movie doesn't last very long, but it tells enough of a story to show what the whole might have been like and to make it worth seeing.