Tagged: Cartoon Roots

Cartoon Roots, Vol. 2: The Bray Animation Studios

Tom Stathes was a former a student of mine from CUNY Queens College and has since graduated to become a recognized film archivist and historian on silent animated films. Last winter, Stathes released a DVD and Blu-ray collection of silent film cartoons from a personal archive that he has amassed over many years.

For a second act, Tom is putting together a second DVD and Blu-ray set in the Cartoon Roots collection. The collection will feature the works of Bray Studios, an early New York City–production company in operation between 1913 and 1927.1 To raise the money to properly produce this videodisc set, he has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

In the annals of silent film history, animation is often overlooked except for a handful of production companies in operation at the time. Tom’s diligent collecting, curating, and finally publishing the works he has collected over the years provides a fresh look at films produced a century ago to round out our understanding of silent film and animated film. Please consider contribute to this campaign.

Contribute to Bray Studios Animation!

  1. Like many others, the studio folded in the late 1920s concurrent with the coming of sound, which was an immensely disruptive transition for the film industry. ↩

Tom Stathes’s Cartoon Roots on Blu-Ray and DVD

One of my former students at Queens College was Tom Stathes.

In class after class filled with “special snowflakes,” students who demand constant attention only to fail the class anyway, Tom stood out as an exceptional luminary. Not only was he an excellent student, he also amassed an impressive collection of animated films from the silent and early sound era.

With help from many people, including celebrated silent-film accompanists, Ben Model and Robert Israel, Stathes has released a Blu-ray and DVD set of fifteen animated films.

Tommy roots550

The collection, titled Cartoon Roots, is, according to Stathes, a “sampling of many of the important characters, series and studios’ cartoons that populated the silent era of films,” which is Stathes’s favorite period, and “some very exciting rarities from the early sound era.”

Get it as a late Christmas gift for yourself or that film nerd in your life. Or, if you’re teaching a silent film class in the future, round out your curriculum with animated films that were never part of the silent film canon.

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