The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy
R and Animation: Willis H. O’Brien. P: Conquest Pictures Company / Herman Wobber. USA 1915/1917

“This little seen curio, being only one reel in length shows us a foretaste of what Willis H. O’Brien was to achieve with considerably greater success in 1933’s immortal classic King Kong. The Dinosaur and the Missing Link is the earliest of ‘Obie’s work and still in existence today. (…)
Willis O’Brien’s animation methods had been in use in the very early days of film, but it would be these skills that he would perfect from simple trick photography to the exhaustive stop-motion animation processes that became a vital element in feature-length motion pictures and a precurser to contemporary computer graphic animation.
The entire cast of his early films were constructed of wooden skeltons over which the likenesses were sculpted in clay. Today it’s increasingly difficult to appreciate the sheer hard work that went into creating living, breathing monsters for early cinema audience’s delight, particulary with the all too real graphics that we now come to expect.”
Classic Horror Movies