Raoul Barré - Text
Vital-Achille-Raoul Barré was born on 29 January 1874 and died on 21 May 1932. He moved to Paris in July 1891 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and contributed to several newspapers after offering them his skills as a caricaturist. He settled in New York in 1913. Barré had contacted Charles Pathé and the Edison workshops in 1912. He began working with William C. Nolan on promotional films while making animated films before opening one of the first animated drawing studios, in the Bronx in 1914.
That same year, Barré found a solution for the problem of registration from one drawing to the next with the peg bar, which makes it possible to trace exactly each drawing sheet using two mechanically-produced perforations made with pegs attached to the work table with a ruler. This invention had considerable impact on the industry, optimizing production time while avoiding problems due to the instability of the drawing.
Barré was also behind the slash system, which consisted dividing the image up into areas in which the characters will move. This technique was abandoned in favour of the cel animation system patented by Earl Hurd. Barré nevertheless tried out other techniques for coordinating characters, decor and effects by using transparent materials such as glass plates (enabling him in particular to insert foregrounds behind which the characters could advantageously pass, as in Kid Kelly’s Bathing Adventure, 1915).
Barré’s studio relied much less on the division of labour than the John Randolph Bray studio. There, drawings were not simply copied or traced by assistants, but were original drawings by animators, photographed image by image.
Barré joined with the animator Charles Bowers in 1916 to found the Barré-Bowers Studio. This collaboration lasted until 1919, when Raoul Barré abandoned animated film.
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Animators who worked in Raoul Barré’s studio: Gregory La Cava, Frank Moser, Pat Sullivan and Dick Huemer.
Series produced by the Raoul Barré studio: Animated Grouch Chasers, Phables, Mutt and Jeff.
