J.R. Bray, Animation Pioneer and "A Comic Artist's Dream" (1913)

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John Randolph Bray (August 25, 1879 - October 10, 1978) was an American animator. He produced the second animated film in color, The Debut of Thomas Cat (1920), in Brewster Color, developed by Percy D. Brewster of Newark, New Jersey. (The first color animated film was Winsor McCay's Little Nemo from 1911.) Bray Productions produced over 500 films between 1913 and 1937, mostly animation films and documentary shorts.

Bray's first cartoon film was "The Dachshund and the Sausage: A Comic Artist's Dream" (1913).

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J.R. Bray started the first animation studio dedicated to a character series. Colonel Heeza Liar debuted in 1915. Here is an early entry, "Colonel Heeza Liar at the Bat" (1915).

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Earl Hurd (September 14, 1880 – September 28, 1940) was a pioneering American animator and film director. He is noted for creating and producing the silent Bobby Bumps animated short subject series for early animation producer J.R. Bray's Bray Productions. Hurd and Bray are jointly responsible for developing the processes involved in cel animation, and were granted patents for their processes in 1914.

Here is a link to "Bobby Bumps Starts a Lodge" (1916).

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Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years before World War I. The studio was founded in December 1914 by J. R. Bray, perhaps was one of the first studios entirely devoted to series animation at the time. Its first series was Bray's Colonel Heeza Liar, but from the beginning the studio brought in outsiders to direct promising new series.

The year 1915 brought Earl Hurd and Paul Terry; the former became J. R. Bray's business partner and directed Bobby Bumps, the latter was employed under duress and directed Farmer Al Falfa. The Fleischer brothers joined in 1916. In 1919, the rival International Film Service studio folded and owner William Randolph Hearst licensed Bray to continue the IFS series, which included Jerry on the Job films adapted from Walter Hoban's comic strip. Many staff members of the former studio transferred to Bray, and most of the new cartoons were directed by the same man who directed them for IFS, Gregory La Cava.

Here is a Farmer Alfalfa cartoon animated by Paul Terry and produced by Bray Productions, "Farmer Alfalfa Sees New York" (1916).

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Bray's goal was to have four units working on four cartoons at any one time; since it took a month to complete a film, four units with staggered schedules produced one cartoon a week for use of the "screen magazines" (a one-reel collection of live-action didactic pieces and travelogues in addition to the cartoon, that was played before the feature). Bray started with Pathé as his distributor, switched to Paramount in 1916, and then switched to Goldwyn Pictures in 1919.

Of the units, one produced his Colonel Heeza Liar, one produced Hurd's Bobby Bumps, and one produced non-series cartoons, usually topical commentaries on the news directed by Leighton Budd, J. D. Leventhal, and others. The fourth unit was the one that kept changing hands. It produced Terry's Farmer Al Falfa in 1916, until Terry left a year later, and the Farmer went with him. It then produced Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell until 1921, when Fleischer left, taking Koko the Clown with him.

The influx of IFS series at the same time broke up the four-unit system—in 1920 there were ten series going simultaneously, with Heeza Liar in hiatus from 1917.

Here's an early cartoon from the Out of the Inkwell series animated by Max Fleischer for Bray Productions, "The Tantilizing Fly" (1919)

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Bray was constantly looking to expand his studio. He financed the semi-independent studio of C. Allen Gilbert to create a series of serious Silhouette Fantasies on classical themes (he actually did some of the animation work for this series). In 1917 he bought out his distributor's screen magazine to produce one of his own, moving him into the real of live-action shorts producer.

During World War I, he assigned Leventhal and Max Fleischer's units to create training and educational cartoons for the U.S. Army. These did so well that after the war Bray was swamped with orders from the government and big business to make films for them. Over a period of years, Bray moved the focus of his company from entertainment to education, putting Leventhal and E. Dean Parmelee in charge of the technical department. Dr. Rowland Rogers became educational director, while Jamison "Jam" Handy was put in charge of a Chicago–Detroit branch for creating films for the auto industry, Bray's largest private client.

Here's a link to an early educational short from Bray Productions, "How the Telephone Talks" (1919).

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Walter Benjamin Lantz (April 27, 1899 – March 22, 1994) was an American cartoonist, animator, film producer, and director, best known for founding Walter Lantz Productions and creating Woody Woodpecker.

By the age of 16, Lantz was working in the animation department under director Gregory La Cava. Lantz then worked at the John R. Bray Studios on the Jerry On The Job series. In 1924, Lantz directed, animated, and even starred in his first cartoon series, Dinky Doodle, and soon replaced George "Vernon" Stallings as head of production (In the 1920s, Bray began to concentrate on competing with Hal Roach, the "king of two-reelers"). Lantz moved to Hollywood, California after Bray switched to a publicity film studio in 1927, where he worked briefly for director Frank Capra and was a gag writer for Mack Sennett comedies.

Here's an early Dinky Doodle adventure directed, animated, and even starring Walter Lantz, "Dinky Doodle's Bedtime Story" (1926) released Bray Productions.

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Race Riot is a 1929 animated short subject, featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The short concerns Oswald trying to convince his horse, Mopey, to run in a horse race and win it. The cartoon is noted for being the first entirely produced and directed by Walter Lantz. It was released by Universal Pictures on September 2, 1929.

In 1928, Lantz was hired by Charles B. Mintz as director on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series for Universal Studios. Earlier that year, Mintz and his brother-in-law George Winkler had succeeded in snatching Oswald from the character's creator, Walt Disney. Universal president Carl Laemmle grew dissatisfied with the Mintz-Winkler product and fired them, deciding instead to produce the Oswalds on the Universal lot. While schmoozing with Laemmle, Lantz wagered that if he could beat Laemmle in a game of poker, the character would be his. As fate would have it, Lantz won the bet, and Oswald was now his character.

Lantz inherited many of his initial staff, including animator Tom Palmer and musician Bert Fiske from the Winkler studio, but importantly he chose fellow New York animator, Bill Nolan, to help develop the series. Nolan's previous credentials included inventing the panorama background and developing a new, streamlined Felix the Cat. Nolan was (and still is) probably best known for perfecting the "rubber hose" style of animation.