International Film Service

International Film Service (IFS) was an American animation studio created to exploit the popularity of the comic strips controlled by William Randolph Hearst.

In 1914, William Randolph Hearst expanded his International News Service wire syndicate into the International Picture Service, a syndicate formed to create newsreels, when newsreels were an entirely new idea. The success of the Hearst Newsreel led the media magnate to create International Film Service (IFS) in 1915. The purpose of this company was to translate Hearst's top comic strip properties into "living comic strips", to be added to the tail-end of the newsreels. For Hearst, the purpose of these cartoons was to be the same as the comics: to increase the circulation of his newspapers. The fact that former Hearst employees Winsor McCay, George McManus, and Bud Fisher were all doing very well with animated cartoons based on their Hearst comic strips ("Little Nemo", The Newlyweds, and Mutt and Jeff) may have had something to do with it as well, since Hearst was a sore loser.

To lead this new studio, Hearst did what he usually did: lured the best talent away from his competitors with the promise of the kind of huge salary only a Hearst could afford. The supervisor was Gregory La Cava, who had animated for the Raoul Barré studio. La Cava was given director credit for all of the IFS cartoons. IFS cartoons were the first comic strip properties to give proper credit to the director and animators, as opposed to just the creator of the comic (their credit was in tiny print on the screen, but it was there). With him came William Nolan and Frank Moser, the fastest animators in the business. Hearst even hired Raoul Barré, head of another animation studio, to animate his first series and teach the new hires how animation was done.

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