Bug Vaudeville (1921)

Winsor McCay was the first to bring animated cartoons to a wide audience, predating Walt Disney and Max Fleischer. McCay started as a newspaper cartoonist, creating the successful strips "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend." In this 12 minute film, a tramp comes out from a group of meticulously drawn trees and falls asleep, muttering that cheesecakes give him strange dreams. A series of bugs put on vaudeville acts against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds. The performance ends with a spider who grabs a silhouetted member of the audience and eats him whole.

At 00:49, the performance begins with a grasshopper who "juggles" an ant for 70 seconds, though this would probably be better described as a Risley act.