Bray Studios
| Animation | |
| Industry | Motion pictures |
| Founded | December 1914 |
| Founder | J. R. Bray |
| Headquarters | United States |
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Key people
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J. R. Bray |
Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States during the years of 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. Carl Anderson, later known for the comic strip Henry, directed The Police Dog from the beginning of the company. 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.
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 travelogs 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.
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