A great fan of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Art Wood collected cels, storyboards, and character drawings from some of the most famous creators of animated cartoons. The collection is full of such surprising "firsts," as a paper drawing for Gertie, the first popular animated feature, a cel and presentation drawing from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first popular full-length feature. While works relating to animated cartoon art make up a small portion of the collection, they are among the most important in the animation field.

Pioneering animator Winsor McCay (1869-1934) created this line drawing for the scene in which Gertie encounters a woolly mammoth in the first commercially successful animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur. In 1903 the American Museum of Natural History in New York mounted the first exhibition of dinosaur bones which captured McCay's imagination. He created the film before the invention of animation cels, so he and his assistants had to draw thousands of images on paper and film them individually. He first presented his animated dinosaur as part of a Vaudeville act in which he stood on a stage and introduced Gertie, who then "walked out" on a movie screen. He asked her to perform tricks and she complied. Audiences, unaccustomed to film, often thought Gertie was real. McCay, already famous as a comic strip and editorial cartoon artist, had created two animated films prior to Gertie the Dinosaur - Little Nemo and The Story Of A Mosquito. Gertie has been listed on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress since 1991.

Winsor McCay, [Gertie the Dinosaur], 1914. Ink on tracing paper. LC-DIG-ppmsc-02839