Solemplex
To me, this movie is perfection.
Teringer
An Exercise In Nonsense
Josephina
Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.
Delight
Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"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.
tavm
I saw three versions of this on YouTube (as linked from Google Video). One of them had a heavy metal score that seemed WAY unsuitable. Beautiful images of the forest and the half human-half horse figures that still makes one take his/her breath away some 86 years later. Would be nice to see if any other fragments have survived of this most fascinating film from the father of animation, Winsor McCay. As it is, it's still interesting to watch a young centaur couple try to get the approval of the older one and then have have a young boy who says "thank you" at the end. And thank you, Mr. McCay for all your contributions to the art of animation.
MartinHafer
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.
Snow Leopard
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.
