John Randolph Bray ran the first American cartoon factory from 1913 through the 1920s. In its time, just about every major artist int he field except Walt Disney's Kansas City crew worked for him. So it's interesting to see this early technical promotion film in which Wallace Carlson shows us how he goes about making one of his "Dreamy Dud" cartoons.
It's an abbreviated version of the process. This would have us think that Mr. Carlson did everything by himself except for carrying the thousands of in-between sheets to the camera; for that, he had a small girl in a smock to help him. Actually, Bray's success was predicated on his assembly-line methods. After he left the animation field, he lived very well on the patents that Earl Hurd and he had assembled.
This is not, as some have remarked, the first movie to show the technical process of cartoon making. About half of Winsor McKay's LITTLE NEMO in 1911 consists of gags on the subject. Nonetheless, as an indicator of the process and for a chance to see Mr. Carlson and his boss, it's tremendously interesting.