Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House (1921) ** 1/2 (out of 4)The third "Rarebit" film that Winsor McCay would make in 1921, this one here has a wife eating rarebit and of course having a bad dream that night. In the dream her husband gets tired of their high mortgage and land taxes so he decides to make their house fly so that they can save money. For the rest of the film we see the two flying around in their house trying to find a cheap and safe place to live. I think the idea behind this film was much better than the actual execution. There's no doubt that the animation is top-notch as McCay never had a problem getting interesting visuals on the screen. There are many great ones here including the entire bit where the house takes off and begins to fly over various locations so that the husband can find one he likes. There's also some very good stuff in outer space that looks terrific. With that said, the majority of what we see just doesn't have any sort of emotion behind it. There's really no laughs, no drama or anything else. Everything is pretty much flat in regards to any type of entertainment coming from the actual story. McCay fans will probably still want to watch it but there's no question that it doesn't rank among his best films.

Watching The Flying House, I couldn't help but think that many of the sequences of the house spinning around up and down was just Mr. McCay showing off as I believe if the couple's home was really doing that they would've been really dizzy! This must've been the first time there was an animated depiction of space with the earth and moon moving side-by-side. Also love the detail of the gas engines with all the wheels pulling all the pulley gadgets constantly and the final sequence where we see a rocket about to explode on the moon instead destroying the house leaving the couple spinning around before they start to fall hastening the woman to wake up...Fascinating if less known of Winsor McCay's animated shorts, this Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend entry certainly keeps on its toes in movement and, through written balloons, dialogue. Highly essential viewing for any animation history buff.

This is one of the coolest early animations I have seen and probably the most enjoyable here in the 21st century of all the McCay films. Unlike his early LITTLE NEMO and GERTIE cartoons, this one is 100% animated and have marvelous animation and exquisite backgrounds. Sure, it's black and white and is a silent film, but for its time it was a terrific film--one that is about as good as you can find at that time.Like the other "Rarebit" films from McCay Studios, this film just goes to show you that the recent commercial about cheese IS correct--"Behold the power of cheese"! All feature people eating cheese and then having bizarre dreams. This flying house one is just amazing and a lot of fun. The lady who partook of the cheese dreams that her husband uses his genius to make their house fly!! And, after buzzing around the Earth for a while, the house leaves orbit and heads out to space--being highly reminiscent of the Georges Méliès film LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE. A wonderful and timeless piece of history--not to be missed.

Winsor McCay was a newspaper cartoonist in the glorious days when cartoonists were given an entire over-sized Sunday newspaper page on which to give their artwork free rein. An absolute master of perspective, McCay was best at dream-like and nightmarish scenarios, which explains why his two most successful projects were 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' (dreams) and 'Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend' (nightmares).This is a good place to explain the origin of that weird word 'rarebit'. A dish of toasted cheese and bread, with seasoning, is known in Britain as 'Welsh rabbit'. This was meant as an English joke: supposedly, the Welsh are so incompetent that toasted cheese is the nearest they can come to cooking a game dish (rabbit). In American restaurants, Welsh rabbit was often the least expensive dish on the menu (because of its cheap ingredients) but uninformed customers would often mistakenly assume that Welsh 'rabbit' must be a meat dish, significantly cheaper than the other meat dishes on the bill of fare. To avoid this misunderstanding, some American host changed the spelling to 'rarebit', and it caught on. In McCay's comic strip 'Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend', a man or woman would go to bed after a dinner of Welsh rarebit, and would experience a bizarre nightmare. This popular newspaper strip fostered at least one live-action silent film (by Edwin S Porter), and several animations by McCay himself.'The Flying House' (an instalment in McCay's 'Rarebit' series) is the most lyrical of his cartoons, and only slightly nightmarish. A woman joins her husband Bert in bed after eating a rarebit. But she awakens to discover that Bert has gone up to the attic to tinker with some odd machinery. It develops that Bert has changed the house into an aeroplane, which he takes into the stratosphere, and then to outer space.SPOILERS COMING. McCay's visuals are impressive, the more so since he drew them all himself without the help of 'in-betweeners'. During the outer-space climax, I was intrigued that he drew Earth from an oblique angle ... rather than the usual cliché of putting it 'right-side up' with the Antarctic lowermost. The flight of the house is lyrical, rapturous, and -- unlike McCay's other 'Rarebit' adventures -- not remotely nightmarish ... until the very ending, when the house explodes and the husband and wife plummet to Earth. I'll rate this delightful cartoon a full 10 out of 10: it isn't very funny, but McCay is striving here for thrills and visual splendour rather than laughs.Sadly, almost none of McCay's original artwork survives. In 1982, I interviewed American comic-book artist Leonard B Cole, who worked alongside artist Robert McCay (Winsor's son) in the 1940s. Cole told me that McCay once brought a large quantity of his father's artwork to the studio where they worked, and offered to give it away to any artist who would take it. There were no takers, so McCay simply threw out the lot! Today, those illustration boards would be priceless. (Long before I met him, Cole regretted his decision to pass up the offer.) Now, if I only knew the precise date when Robert McCay threw away those art boards, I could power up the time machine and...