Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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      Still from John Randolph Bray’s The Artist’s Dream (1913).

      “I thought there was good money in it,” he told an interviewer, explaining his motives. But before animation could generate significant revenue, the processes behind it would need to be reimagined. What McCay had treated as an artisanal endeavor—slow and labor-intensive­—­Bray saw as a process that needed to become more efficient. He wanted to speed up production and make animated cartoons on a larger scale. America was at the beginning of a new age of mass media, led by cinema and radio, and Bray predicted that cartoons could be similarly lucrative if he could find a way to release them on a regular schedule. His second film, Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa, a spoof of former president Teddy Roosevelt’s globetrotting exploits, was the first in a series meant to regularly appear in theaters, not as a one-off or as part of a vaudeville act, the way McCay had released his films.

      Shortly thereafter, Bray started Bray Productions. Working with an employee, Earl Hurd, he began testing new methods to make animation more efficient. One of the first problems the men addressed was how to combine moving characters with static backgrounds. McCay had simply ignored this problem, drawing everything—both moving and stationary parts—in every single frame, a redundant and time-consuming process. Bray’s solution was to print multiple copies of the background and then draw his characters onto them, scraping away parts of the background that didn’t need to be in the picture. This saved the animator from having to draw the entire background anew for each frame, so it was an enormous timesaver. It also helped make the picture look more consistent, avoiding the little errors and “vibrations” introduced by constantly having to retrace stationary images. Within a year of this advance, Earl Hurd then pioneered the use of “cels,” transparent sheets on which moving parts of the action were drawn. These cels would be a mainstay of animation for decades to come. Placed over the backgrounds, which now needed to be printed only once, the clear sheets eliminated problems with screen flicker that had previously been caused by photographing the translucent tracing paper. Because they could be washed and reused, they also helped save money. Other new efficiencies used by Bray included the use of “cycles,” recycled drawings such as the leg movements in a stride, that were used multiple times in the same cartoon. Together, these and other breakthroughs revolutionized the technical aspects of animation, increasing efficiency while lowering costs.

      Bray was bringing to animation the same mindset that Andrew Carnegie had brought to steelmaking, or that John D. Rockefeller had brought to oil production. Within a few years, animators would nickname him “the Henry Ford of animation,” a reputation he helped cultivate by appearing in magazine profiles dressed not as an eccentric artist, but as a shrewd mogul: a high collar riding halfway up his neck, every hair on his head nailed neatly into place. During interviews, he avoided speaking in the romantic style of Winsor McCay, and instead adopted the motivational style of language that captains of industry used to promote the American dream. “If you have faith in your dream, and faith that you can make it a reality, don’t be afraid to take a chance!” he told one magazine.

      Bray modeled himself on moguls who didn’t just change industries, but owned them, building great monopolies and crushing their competitors. He saw animation as a frontier where the landgrab was only just starting. Soon he began patenting his processes, hoping to make a fortune by charging his competitors fees. Once his patents were registered, he then began suing. In 1914, Winsor McCay himself received in the mail a “citation of infringement,” claiming that he “would be required to pay royalties on all future productions of animated cartoons to the holder of the patent rights.”

      McCay was furious. “He felt he was high-jacked and double-crossed,” according to his friend Isadore Klein, who would later become a cartoonist for the New Yorker. Bray responded carefully, never admitting that he had learned anything from McCay. “I didn’t know Winsor McCay was doing anything,” he told an interviewer in 1974, when he was ninety-four years old. “I just got the idea that I wanted to make animated cartoons for the movies. Winsor McCay never thought of that.”

      Fortunately for McCay, Bray’s original patent, filed in February 1914, was rejected by the patent examiner. He had seen McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and declared Bray’s process too similar. Both used cross marks to register stationary drawings, both had an assistant trace the nonmoving elements, and both had recycled drawings in order to use fewer of them. Bray’s lawyer, Clair W. Fairbank, counterargued that Bray’s process was actually quite different. He highlighted Bray’s various refinements, such as his method of printing multiple backgrounds, whereas McCay had simply retraced the background art for every frame. After six months of arguing, pressing his case and wearing down the bureaucrats, Fairbank eventually got the patent granted, along with several more patents, including one for the use of cels. Now, with the paperwork settled and in place, Bray resumed his legal assault.

      What was perhaps most insulting to McCay was Bray’s tone during their fight. Bray was condescending, sneering that McCay’s cartoons were nothing more than “an interesting curiosity exhibited and lectured about,” as if they carried little more than academic value. Then he made a bold accusation, claiming that McCay’s inefficient methods had “caused the commercial failure of all attempts to secure animated cartoons prior to my invention.” He was basically saying that animation was something he had to rescue from McCay, and McCay fumed over the misrepresentation. He certainly wasn’t against Bray’s genuine improvements; he actually encouraged them, since they promoted animation as an art form. What offended him was the prospect of having to pay Bray royalties, as well as Bray’s insinuation that McCay was somehow degrading animation. Bray had even gone so far as to call his legal offensive a way to “uphold the dignity of the animated cartoon.”

      To McCay, this condescending language was a way to obscure Bray’s true goal of establishing a monopoly. Bray was contributing useful new methods to animation but wasn’t necessarily using them for purposes that Winsor respected. Some of Bray’s cartoons were clever, but others felt like novelties built around cheap gags made to get quick laughs. Bray valued quantity over quality.

      McCay avoided the lawsuit after his lawyers argued that Little Nemo in Slumberland was shown in theaters years before Bray filed for his patents. This protected him from further lawsuits but didn’t protect other animators. When McCay learned that Bray was planning to sue others, he didn’t protest, but instead responded contradictory to his professed goal of championing animation for its own sake. He secretly worked out a deal whereby he would get a cut of any settlements. The arrangement was kept quiet; historians wouldn’t know about it for decades, until letters from Bray’s attorney were discovered in McCay’s private papers. Even so, McCay’s cut would never amount to much. In 1932, the year Bray’s patents ran out, it was a mere $65.71—“McCay won a moral victory but about eighteen cents in cash,” Isadore Klein joked.