Tom Ray , American animation cartoonist (Warner Bros. Cartoons) has died he was 90

Thomas Archer Ray^[1] died he was 90. Ray was an American animator. (August 2, 1919 – April 7, 2010^[2])

Ray was born in Williams, Arizona.^[1] He began work at Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1937. Over the first two decades of his career, he was a junior animator who received no screen credit until Destination Earth in 1956. In 1958, he became a master animator in the Robert McKimson unit. Later, he transferred to the Chuck Jones unit, where he co-directed Adventures of the Road-Runner and several Bugs Bunny Show episodes. He followed Jones to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1963; there, he directed two Tom and Jerry compilation shorts, Matinee Mouse in 1966 and Shutter Bugged Cat in 1967.

Tom was one of the five animators who created "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" back in 1966. In addition to the Grinch, we can also thank Tom for being part of the team that brought us Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Yogi Bear, and a smart-aleck, Brooklyn-type rabbit known to most of us by the name of Bugs.

His later credits include animation on Pink Panther shorts, Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, Chuck Jones TV Specials, numerous Filmation and Hanna Barbera series, Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. Ray directed many episodes of various series including Transformers and Garfield and Friends.

After his retirement from the Los Angeles animation business in 1998, Ray founded his own animation studio, Tomstone Animation, first located in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Ray moved his studio to Virginia Beach, Virginia just before he died in Virginia on April 7, 2010.

Ray's wife, inker/painter Anna Lois Ray, died in 1994. Ray's son, Thomas G. "Greg" Ray, and daughter, Donna Mouliot, followed him into the animation business.

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