Raoul Barré
Encyclopedia
Raoul Barré was a Canadian
and American
cartoonist
, animator
of the silent film
era, and artist
.
Barré was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only artistic child (out of twelve) of an importer of communion wine. He studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris
, France
, starting in 1891, and remained there for several years as a political cartoonist--he was a loud critic of the unjust trials of Captain Alfred Dreyfus
. One of Barré's opponents in the war of words and cartoons was Émile Cohl
, writing anonymously. On returning to Canada in 1898, he gave birth to the French Canadian
comic strip
.
Barré moved to New York City
in the United States in 1903. In 1912, Barré (who had started a syndicated
comic strip for American and Canadian audiences) saw an animated film that inspired him to go into the industry (perhaps Winsor McCay
's "How a Mosquito Operates"). He picked Edison Studios
to produce his cartoons and while visiting the studio, met Bill Nolan
, a live-action shorts producer who became his business and artistic partner. The two worked together for a year putting out animated and live-action commercials for various companies (quite possibly the first ever use of animation for advertising
). It was during this period that the two worked out a system for animating radically different from that practised by anyone else at the time.
Various animators had come up with different methods to keep their drawings lined up, but none of them worked very well. Barré and Nolan's solution was to punch two holes at the bottom of all of their sheets and pass them through two pegs glued to the animation table. This peg system is still in practice today. The system they used for animation, on the other hand, was a dead end precisely because it produced registration problems the peg system couldn’t always fix. The basis of this "slash system" was to tear away the paper being drawn on to show the change underneath. For example, if a character was to move his arm, the first drawing would consist of character and background, then the arm would be carefully torn out to reveal the next sheet down and a new arm was drawn on the new paper revealed. The slash system lasted through the 1920s at various studios before being replaced by Earl Hurd
's cell system.
By 1914, Barré and Nolan felt confident enough to start their own studio, totally independent of Edison and dedicated 100% to animation. This Barré-Nolan Studio
was probably the first of its kind (although Bray Productions
also had a good claim to the title). The main title produced by the new studio was a series of inserts for the mostly live-action Animated Grouch Chaser series, distributed by Edison.
In 1916, William Randolph Hearst
, multi-millionaire and newspaper magnate, started a rival animation studio called International Film Service
and hired most of Barré's animators, including Bill Nolan, by paying them more money than Barré could provide. Barré was reduced to being a contractor for IFS, animating the series Phables. After seven cartoons, he quit.
Another man who had stood up to Hearst was "Captain" Bud Fisher
, who had the courts uphold his copyright ownership to his Mutt and Jeff comic strip, which had been printed by Hearst newspapers for nine years. Fisher had turned to independent animator Charles Bowers
to turn his strip into a cartoon, but Bowers did not have the facilities to pull this off. Barré had the facilities, but not the men. A partnership was born in the form of Barré-Bowers Studios situated in the Fordham section of The Bronx. Barré did what he could to improve the quality of the animation in his films, investing some of the profits into art classes for the animators (in anticipation of Walt Disney
during the Thirties).
Mutt and Jeff was a strong money-maker for Barré, Bowers, and Fisher, but Barré began to get tired of it all as the years passed, due to personality conflicts with both partners. Barré retired from animation in 1919, amid rumors of a nervous breakdown. He settled into his home in Glen Cove, Long Island, and started selling his oil paintings to the public, as well as some commercial poster work. In the meantime, the surviving partners had a falling out and by 1926 Mutt and Jeff was finished as a film animation property.
In 1926, Barré came to long for the world of animation again, just so long as he wouldn't have any business responsibilities to weigh him down. He got what he wanted with the position of "guest animator" for Pat Sullivan Productions
working on Felix the Cat
. The cartoons Barré created for Sullivan are considered the best he ever did, as well as the best Felix cartoons ever made (the chicken antagonist in such cartoons as "Felix Dines and Pines" and "The Oily Bird" was drawn entirely by Barré). Raoul Barré retired from animation the second time in 1927, this time on a high note. Barré spent the last few years of his life drawing oil paintings and political cartoons (helping to make his son-in-law Gaspard Fauteux Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec
) while starting his own art school.
He died in Montreal on May 21, 1932 of cancer
and was buried in the city's Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery
.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
and American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
, animator
Animator
An animator is an artist who creates multiple images that give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence; the images are called frames and key frames. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, video games, and the internet. Usually, an...
of the silent film
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
era, and artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
.
Barré was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only artistic child (out of twelve) of an importer of communion wine. He studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, starting in 1891, and remained there for several years as a political cartoonist--he was a loud critic of the unjust trials of Captain Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...
. One of Barré's opponents in the war of words and cartoons was Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl , born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a French caricaturist of the largely forgotten Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".-Biography:Émile's father Elie was a rubber salesman, and his mother, Emilie...
, writing anonymously. On returning to Canada in 1898, he gave birth to the French Canadian
French Canadian
French Canadian or Francophone Canadian, , generally refers to the descendents of French colonists who arrived in New France in the 17th and 18th centuries...
comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
.
Barré moved to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in the United States in 1903. In 1912, Barré (who had started a syndicated
Print syndication
Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. They offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own/represent copyrights....
comic strip for American and Canadian audiences) saw an animated film that inspired him to go into the industry (perhaps Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator.A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades...
's "How a Mosquito Operates"). He picked Edison Studios
Edison Studios
Edison Studios was an American motion picture production company owned by the Edison Company of inventor Thomas Edison. The studio made close to 1,200 films as the Edison Manufacturing Company and Thomas A. Edison, Inc. until the studio's closing in 1918...
to produce his cartoons and while visiting the studio, met Bill Nolan
Bill Nolan (animator)
William "Bill" Nolan was an Irish-American animated cartoon writer, animator, director, and artist. He is best-known for creating and perfecting the rubber hose style of animation and for streamlining Felix the Cat. From 1925 to 1927, he worked on a loose animated adaptation of George Herriman's...
, a live-action shorts producer who became his business and artistic partner. The two worked together for a year putting out animated and live-action commercials for various companies (quite possibly the first ever use of animation for advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
). It was during this period that the two worked out a system for animating radically different from that practised by anyone else at the time.
Various animators had come up with different methods to keep their drawings lined up, but none of them worked very well. Barré and Nolan's solution was to punch two holes at the bottom of all of their sheets and pass them through two pegs glued to the animation table. This peg system is still in practice today. The system they used for animation, on the other hand, was a dead end precisely because it produced registration problems the peg system couldn’t always fix. The basis of this "slash system" was to tear away the paper being drawn on to show the change underneath. For example, if a character was to move his arm, the first drawing would consist of character and background, then the arm would be carefully torn out to reveal the next sheet down and a new arm was drawn on the new paper revealed. The slash system lasted through the 1920s at various studios before being replaced by Earl Hurd
Earl Hurd
Earl Hurd 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...
's cell system.
By 1914, Barré and Nolan felt confident enough to start their own studio, totally independent of Edison and dedicated 100% to animation. This Barré-Nolan Studio
Barré Studio
Barré Studio was, in all probability, the first film studio dedicated to animation . It was founded by Raoul Barré and William Nolan in 1914. They began with advertising films , then got a series with Edison called the Animated Grouch Chaser...
was probably the first of its kind (although Bray Productions
Bray Productions
Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years before World War I.- History :The studio was founded in December 1914 by J. R. Bray, perhaps the first studio entirely devoted to animation, and series animation at that...
also had a good claim to the title). The main title produced by the new studio was a series of inserts for the mostly live-action Animated Grouch Chaser series, distributed by Edison.
In 1916, William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
, multi-millionaire and newspaper magnate, started a rival animation studio called International Film Service
International Film Service
International Film Service was an American animation studio created to exploit the popularity of the comic strips controlled by William Randolph Hearst.- History :...
and hired most of Barré's animators, including Bill Nolan, by paying them more money than Barré could provide. Barré was reduced to being a contractor for IFS, animating the series Phables. After seven cartoons, he quit.
Another man who had stood up to Hearst was "Captain" Bud Fisher
Bud Fisher
Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher was an American cartoonist who created Mutt and Jeff, the first successful daily comic strip in the United States....
, who had the courts uphold his copyright ownership to his Mutt and Jeff comic strip, which had been printed by Hearst newspapers for nine years. Fisher had turned to independent animator Charles Bowers
Charles Bowers
Charles R. Bowers was an American cartoonist and slapstick comedian during the silent film and early "talkie" era. He was forgotten for decades and his name was notably absent from most histories of the Silent Era, although his work was enthusiastically reviewed by André Breton and a number of...
to turn his strip into a cartoon, but Bowers did not have the facilities to pull this off. Barré had the facilities, but not the men. A partnership was born in the form of Barré-Bowers Studios situated in the Fordham section of The Bronx. Barré did what he could to improve the quality of the animation in his films, investing some of the profits into art classes for the animators (in anticipation of Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
during the Thirties).
Mutt and Jeff was a strong money-maker for Barré, Bowers, and Fisher, but Barré began to get tired of it all as the years passed, due to personality conflicts with both partners. Barré retired from animation in 1919, amid rumors of a nervous breakdown. He settled into his home in Glen Cove, Long Island, and started selling his oil paintings to the public, as well as some commercial poster work. In the meantime, the surviving partners had a falling out and by 1926 Mutt and Jeff was finished as a film animation property.
In 1926, Barré came to long for the world of animation again, just so long as he wouldn't have any business responsibilities to weigh him down. He got what he wanted with the position of "guest animator" for Pat Sullivan Productions
Pat Sullivan (film producer)
Patrick Sullivan was an Australian cartoonist, pioneer animator and film producer, best known for producing the first Felix the Cat silent cartoons. Sullivan arrived in the United States around 1910, after spending several months in London...
working on Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent film era. His black body, white eyes, and giant grin, coupled with the surrealism of the situations in which his cartoons place him, combine to make Felix one of the most recognized cartoon characters in film history...
. The cartoons Barré created for Sullivan are considered the best he ever did, as well as the best Felix cartoons ever made (the chicken antagonist in such cartoons as "Felix Dines and Pines" and "The Oily Bird" was drawn entirely by Barré). Raoul Barré retired from animation the second time in 1927, this time on a high note. Barré spent the last few years of his life drawing oil paintings and political cartoons (helping to make his son-in-law Gaspard Fauteux Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
) while starting his own art school.
He died in Montreal on May 21, 1932 of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
and was buried in the city's Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery
Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery
Founded in 1854, Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges is a 343-acre cemetery located in the borough of Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The entrance and the grounds run along a part of chemin Côte-des-Neiges and up the slopes of Mount Royal...
.
External links
- Biography of Raoul Barré (in French), by Michel Viau: http://www.bdquebec.qc.ca/auteurs/barre/rbarre.htm