1918: The first animated documentary The Sinking of the Lusitania

The Sinking of the Lusitania is the earliest silent animated documentary film which shot by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. This film has twelve minutes which is the longest work of animation at that time. it propagates the recreating the 1915 sinking of the British liner RMS Lusitania.

In 1915 a German submarine torpedoed and sank the RM S Lusitania; 128 Americans were among the 1,198 dead. The event outraged McCay. In 1916, McCay rebelled against his employer's stance and began work on the patriotic Sinking of the Lusitania on his own time with his own money. The incident is the trigger for America's entry into World War I.

The Sinking of the Lusitania has continued the success of McCay’s earlier animation, likes Little Nemo, How a Mosquito Perates, and Gertie the Dinosaur. Which are all drawing with rice papers. It opens with a live-action prologue and uses with 25,000 drawings. That spent McCay and his assistant's twenty-two months to complete it.

In 2017, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
This animated film was commanded by animation historian Paul Wells as "a seminal moment in the development of the animated film." The Sinking of the Lusitania combines the documentary style with the propaganda element, also it is the model of the manifestation of the animation modernism.

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