John Randolph Bray - Text
John Randolph Bray was born on 25 August 1879 and died on 10 October 1978. He began his career as a journalist and in 1903 became a cartoonist for the Daily Eagle in New York (and later for Judge with the comic strip Little Johnny and His Teddy Bears). He became interested in animation in 1910; in this field he would contribute to leading it in new directions by seeking to patent methods which would make it possible to reduce the amount of work required to produce animated drawings.
With Raoul Barré he was one of the first to put in place a studio structure based on the division of labour, which made it possible to produce assembly-line animated drawings, with their production time reduced to the minimum – hence his nickname, “the Henry Ford of animation.” After he showed an animated film (The Artist’s Dream) to Charles Pathé in 1913, Pathé offered him a contract to produce six films in six months. Because the production time of his first attempt had, precisely, stretched over this same period of time, Bray was obliged to come up with a solution to optimize the creation of his next films.
Bray filed five patent applications in the space of two years, with the idea of charging studios and animators who were using his methods. He also recruited the animator Earl Hurd in 1915, himself the author of three patents between 1915 and 1921, with the two of them establishing the Bray-Hurd Process Company the year of Hurd’s arrival. That same year, Bray signed a contract with Paramount to produce his comedies at a rate of 1,000 feet per week.
Bray’s interest gradually shifted to military training and education films (which he produced until the late 1960s), abandoning the production of cartoons in 1928.
* * *
Animators who worked in John Randolph Bray’s studio:
Earl Hurd (1915-22), Max Fleischer (1916-21), Gregory La Cava (1919-21), Paul Terry (1915-16), Dave Fleischer (1920-21), Walter Lantz (1924-25), Raoul Barré (1919), Pat Sullivan (1919), Jack King (1920-21) and Isadore Klein (1920-21).
Series produced by the Bray studio:
Colonel Heeza Liar, The Police Dog, Silhouette Fantasies, Farmer Al Falfa, Bobby Bumps, The Trick Kids, L.M. Glackens Cartoons, Quacky Doodle, Dinky Doodle, Unnatural History Cartoons, Out of the Inkwell.
Bibliography
- Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982.
- Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.
- Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Solomon, Charles. The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings. New York: Wings Books, 1994.
- Stathes, Tommy José. “The Bray Studios of New York City.” The Bray Animation Project, 2010. http://brayanimation.weebly.com/studio-history.html.
