This film by stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien, the same guy behind the effects of "King Kong" (1933), "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain," reportedly, was originally a three-reel feature, but was subsequently cut to a reel by the producer and with only about half the original picture surviving today. What remains isn't only interesting technically for the stop-motion animation of dinosaurs, but also for the separate live-action bits, which anticipate the structure of "King Kong" in another way with a reflexive narrative that incorporates within the film a surrogate for the filmmaker outside it. The dinosaur stuff is framed as seen through some kind of telescope or visual medium--like a camera. This is further framed by a painting within a dream, which in turn is a story told by the protagonist to children, who've interrupted him from his work of writing--perhaps doubly authoring the very story that is the film. Quite elaborate for under twenty minutes from 1918 and for a film that was already meticulously piece of construction in its modeling and stop-motion animation. It makes me wonder, along with similarities in "The Lost World" (1925), if O'Brien didn't have more to do with the shaping of "King Kong" beyond action scenes such as a giant gorilla fighting a T-Rex--not that that's not incredibly impressive on its own.
Also, I joked about the double entendres of his prior "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" (1915), but now I'm even more suspicious that O'Brien is pulling our legs here with such title cards full of homoerotic suggestions as, "I tried to persuade Joe to remove his clothes and pose as a faun," and all the talk about the hermit "Mad Dick" and his having "gazed through a queer looking instrument." Come to think of it, it seems on odd choice to pick as your story to tell being that male camping trip where you dreamed about giant lizards.