subject: The Origins Of The Animated Feature [print this page] Film animation owes its origins to the comic strip first appearing in 1892, called The Little Bears and Tigers. The strip was written by James Swinnerton for The San Francisco Examiner. In 1893 Down Hogan's Alley by Richard Outcault was published in the New York World. Down Hogan's Alley introduced a character clad in a yellow nightshirt known as The Yellow Kid. The comic strip very quickly became a well-established feature.
Early examples of strips were The Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, and Bringing Up Father. A few of these comic strips featured real live humans (like Buster Brown) and were later adapted into live action films. Others, particularly Krazy Kat and Bringing Up Father lent themselves very well to animation.
William Randolph Hearst, always one to come up with clever promotional devices, began to use animated versions of the Sunday comics in his marketing campaigns. These early, primitive toons had no backgrounds for their simple pen and ink drawings, as no one as yet had figured out how to do backgrounds.
Story lines were so simple as to be nonexistent. The early animations were just a few sight gags, strung together to produce a two or three minute movie. If dialogue was called for, the animator drew a bubble and inserted words into it the same as for the drawn strips. The film paused long enough for the audience to read the words and then started again.
These short animated cartoons did capture the imagination of the public because of their novelty. But this fascination soon wore thin as they were really too short and too simple to keep the audience's attention for long.
The early animators, like Barre, John Bray, Earl Hurd, Leon Searle and Walter Lantz, tried to lessen the negative aspects of the animated film and make them more realistic by raising the bar on the quality of the drawings and adding more drawings to make up a real story.
In 1915, Earl Hurd invented the cel. Mr. Hurd was an employee of the John Bray Studio and his cel became the first major breakthrough in the field of animation. A cel is created by tracing the drawings of the comic strip onto clear sheets of celluloid and laying them over suitable backgrounds on the animation board then photographing them.
The John Bray Studio was exclusively an animation shop. During World War I, the Bray Studio created training and educational cartoons for the U.S. Army. These were such a success that Bray was soon inundated with orders from government and large corporations to make films for them as well.
The Bray Studio, alas, was poorly managed financially and the operating costs soon overran the profits. This led the way for Sam Goldwyn to buy a controlling interest in the studio in 1920. As is often the case in a corporate takeover, the Sam Goldwyn Company instigated a major reorganization of the Bray Studio and the most talented employees walked out the door - talent including Earl Hurd.
John Bray himself was no longer interested in the animated film business and during the 1920's put his energy and efforts into ousting Hal Roach from his throne as the king of the two-reel comedy. This effort failed miserably and John Bray was never heard from again.
The downfall of Bray Studios exemplifies the tired old story of the struggle between creative types insistent on quality and business types insistent on the bottom line. Lucky for animation fans everywhere, the demise of the Bray Studios did not sound the death knell for animated features as they grew more sophisticated and more entertaining with every decade, remaining very much in the cinematic mainstream of today.
