Salute Your Shorts: Fleischer Studios

Earlier this week, Winstar released a new restoration of Fleischer Studios’ Gulliver’s Travels. As the first non-Disney animated feature film made in America, it was a historical milestone. It’s also kind of so-so as far as films go. Beyond its noteworthy realism, the film feels like, and in some ways is in fact, a Disney knock-off. It’s unfortunate, because up until then, many of the Fleischer Studios’ short films had been not only imaginative, but also unlike animation being produced anywhere else and, in all honesty, pretty insane.

The Fleischer brothers’ venture into filmmaking began with the creation of the rotoscope. This is noteworthy because film is, at its heart, a creative medium, and while technical aspects are always important to what gets put out there, the Fleischers’ move to filmmaking is kind of like becoming a painter because you came up with a particularly rosey shade of red pigment in a laboratory. In order to sell the rotoscope he’d designed, Max needed to create a film to show how it could improve animation. His ideas for the rotoscope were twofold: produce realistic movement and increase drawing speed. It was successful in realism and was a standard for many years because of this (though Waltz with Bashir managed its realism through a different ingenious method), but not so much on the speed. Even in tracing, realism takes serious time, which is always at a premium for animation. 

Most importantly, though, in order to show off the invention, Max and his brother Dave were required to make a short film. Dave played Koko the Clown, who quickly became the Fleischers’ mascot, and the two spent many months finishing the less-than-two-minute short to show to producer John Bray. Below is a small documentary, which at 4:18 shows footage of their first short:

Following that, it features in its entirety the second real short in the Out of the Inkwell series, “Tantalizing Fly.” The most surprising thing about the cartoon is how developed it is, despite its age. It features the hallmarks of the Inkwell series, such as a different introduction for Koko, a “lowbrow” slapstick sense of humor and interaction between live action and animation. It’s probably this last part that’s of most interest to spectators now, since it seems pretty cutting edge and almost avant-garde, despite being instituted largely as a cost-cutting measure so that the Fleischers could spend less on backgrounds and animation time. Many years later, Chuck Jones created the landmark Warner Bros. short “Duck Amuck,” which won wide praise for its meta-textual play between what appears in the cartoon and its theoretical creator. But decades before it was made, this was all standard play for the Fleischers’ first series. A particular favorite of mine is 1921’s “Modeling,” which adds a different medium to the mix when Koko interacts with clay:

The Out of the Inkwell series was always a mixed bag, given its strange creative process and overall lax quality control. The films were all directed by Dave Fleischer, but there were no script or storyboards, just a general topic that each animator was assigned. Hell, they didn’t even have pencil tests, which meant that characters could look radically different from one short to the next depending on the lead animator. Dave later came around and punched up the shorts, but it was really up to the animators as to what happened within them. So looking through random Inkwells online can get a little tedious, but their charm when seen occasionally before pictures is obvious. Even though the Fleischers were just trying to make money, more often than not the artistry of these shorts shows through. 

One of the other early developments of the Fleischers was the bouncing ball, as seen in the above short, “My Old Kentucky Home.” (Please try to excuse the deplorable racism of the actual song). First they featured an introduction, then the song, then on subsequent times during the chorus, animated figures instead of a bouncing ball. One of the major developments with these was early synchronized sound with animation, which the Fleischers did four years before Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie.” The first of these was “My Old Kentucky Home,” and while most later shorts were silent to be played along with by theater musicians, it’s an example of how committed the Fleischers were to technical innovation in their filmmaking. 

During this time the Fleischers were also working on shorts with the caricaturist Marcus and co-producing the rather avant-garde series of short films, Marvels of Motion, which played with frame rates to examine familiar actions. But while these shorts were interesting, what led the Fleischers to wealth was the introduction of sound into their normal short film. The studio was still producing some pretty incredible and typically insane shorts, but its series of Talkartoons brought in fresh air and let them step away from Koko in favor of new characters and ideas. Fleischer Studios still didn’t use scripts, to the point where things were post-synched after animation was done, but aside from perhaps Disney, it was still making the best animated shorts available. If Disney’s shorts were remarkable due to their craft and care, the Fleischers’ were worth watching for their anarchy and daring. 

This was most obvious in the studio’s third major character, Betty Boop, whose sexuality is the type of thing Disney still won’t touch. Originally a sexualized dog, to match with the studio’s character Fitz, shown above in “My Kentucky Home” (who later became Bimbo), Betty Boop is a pre-Hays Code character, who in early shorts gets everywhere on her looks.  Her cartoons covered ground that’s just as provocative today as it was in the '30s, such as when she's nearly raped in “Boop-Oop-A-Doop” (1932), and the primary joke is about her losing her virginity. Needless to say, it’s pretty offensive, but it’s also easy to see why her racy shorts were so popular at the time. Because of the era and the studio the cartoons were made at, there was also never a sense of how far the shorts might take her. Fleischer Studios didn’t have any overarching ideas for their characters or what they might or might not do; instead it was entirely up to the creator.

This was also the period of the Fleischer Studios’ most creative, and, given the studio’s strengths, most insane, shorts. Innocuous-sounding films like Betty Boop’s “Snow White” became something else entirely, described by Leonard Maltin as a truly surreal film that achieves the same goals as “Un Chien Andalou” by creating a truly nonlinear film in which no logical link between images exist. The studio also put out “cartoon noirs,” such as “Swing You Sinners,” “Bimbo’s Initiation” and “Cobweb Hotel.” If Disney sought to deliver children’s fantasies to them on celluloid, the Fleischers instead sought out their nightmares—and delivered. They’re almost free associational, with terrors drawn in every direction so that the films seem more like Lynch’s early works than much else in the history of cinema. Anyone who’s seen “Porky in Wackyland” or any of the much later Gogo Dodo cartoons will recognize the influence, though even these can’t touch the Fleischers for randomness.

In mid-1934, Betty Boop lost her defining characteristic as a carefree flapper caught outside her time and became more of a typical mascot, with only her voice and body (now largely covered up) the same as before. Luckily for the studio, just as she was losing her viability as a character and they were running out of good ideas for what to do with a newly-tamed Boop, the company bought the film rights for Popeye from the King Features Syndicate. 

The unsurprisingly titled “Popeye the Sailor” (1933) already features all the trademarks of the series, including the jaunty theme song, Bluto and Olive Oyl’s by-the-numbers conflict, Popeye smashing a lot of things for no particularly good reason, constant repetition of Popeye’s name and an anthropomorphic peg-legged pig (who I like to call Wally). Popeye cartoons left behind most of the surrealism of the Fleischers’ other Talkartoons but kept the expressive gray tones and general art style for most non-central characters. For all their popularity, though, the Popeye shorts aren’t really at the same level as earlier Fleischer cartoons, largely because they forgo so much of the surrealism that makes the studio’s previous works great. Popeye’s Arabian Nights-themed color two-reelers are rather magnificent, but worth going into at more depth at another, later time.

After the studio began Gulliver’s Travels, its non-Popeye cartoons headed towards Disneyfication. Although some holdouts from their previous style remain (“Cobweb Hotel,” for instance, was a fairly late holdout), for the most part it’s a disappointing era. The studio no longer stuck with its surreal feel, searching for an audience of children rather than adults, and essentially neutered its strength in controversial subject matter. The studio’s second feature-length movie effectively killed it off, but before it was bought up by Paramount and lost its identity, the studio put out its swan song. 

The Superman series isn’t really like anything else the Fleischers did, but it does show the direction in which the studio could have gone. It was a Fleischer series with not just pencil tests, but also clearly some time spent on storyboarding. Like the Sinbad shorts, it’s a worthwhile series that’s its own thing, but knowing the background for the series shows how great it really is. Midway through production, Paramount bought and renamed the studio Famous, as well as kicking the Fleischer brothers out of the company.

The Fleischer cartoons are now being rediscovered, since most of them have no copyright status, so, unlike early Disney shorts for instance, they can be posted online with impunity.  Their influence has waned a bit, but oddly enough they haven’t dated nearly as badly as other cartoons from the same era. And it’s always fun to take a look back at them and think of what could have been if the Fleischers rather than Disney had won their old depression-era rivalry.

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Miscellanea: The Fleischers also made quite a few advertisements during the years, which aren’t so far removed from their normal shorts. Yup, still pretty insane. Aside from this, they also had a brief foray into live-action filmmaking with two documentaries on the theory of relativity and evolution (featuring animation only for diagrams). Max was inordinately proud of them, and when fired, eventually did more work on educational films elsewhere.