Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story (New Wave Entertainment, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the 1929 version of The Virginian I looked for something Charles and I could watch that wouldn’t last too long and found it in Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story, a 47-minute documentary available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xemq4sNfMf8, made in 2008 and telling the story of the Fleischer Brothers animation studio, which was founded in the early 1920’s and lasted until 1942. At their peak they were the principal rivals to Walt Disney’s company both artistically and commercially, and this documentary – narrated by Carl Reiner, no slouch in the comic genius department himself – presents their story as a combination of great success, ignominious ending and lasting frustration. There were actually four Fleischer brothers, children of German-Jewish immigrants to New York (“Fleischer” is the German word for “butcher,” by the way, though by the time these particular Fleischers got to America they were tailors, not butchers), not just the two I’d known about – Max Fleischer, who was listed as producer on their films, and Dave Fleischer, listed as director. There were also Leo Fleischer, a musician who composed for the Fleischer films and also recruited major musical stars to appear in them – including jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway – and Charles Fleischer, oldest of the brothers and mostly the company’s business manager (much the way Walt Disney’s brother Roy managed the business end of their company).

The story begins in 1923, when the Fleischers started making animated cartoon films in New York and trying to come up with more innovative techniques than the simple line drawings of the preceding cartoons. Their first successful character was Koko the Clown, who literally poured himself “out of the inkwell” at the opening of his films – an effect one of the Fleischers first thought of when he accidentally knocked over an ink bottle and ink spilled out. The Fleischers anticipated Disney in quite a few advanced techniques Disney is usually given credit for inventing, including the Rotoscope (a way of filming live actors in front of a blank background and then tracing each frame so the actor becomes the basis of an animated character – essentially motion-capture before computers), the multidimensional animation camera and even the sound cartoon: well before Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928), generally considered the first cartoon talkie, the Fleischers were working with Lee DeForest, the pioneer of sound-on-film technology, on experimental cartoon shorts with synchronized sound (though if any of these still exist, this documentary did not contain any). The makers of this film – particularly Mark Nassief, who wrote the script and co-produced with Constantine Nasr, Chris Chaplin (any relation?) and Gabrielle M. Tasulo – make the case that the Fleischers were the first producers to bring an urban sensibility to animated films. Walt Disney had grown up in the Midwest and his films depicted a bucolic, rural America (the design of Disneyland channels every visitor through an idealized “Main Street” which reproduces a typical small American country town of the early 20th century, when Walt Disney grew up), while the Fleischer cartoons were set in New York or other major American cities and featured tough, scrappy characters living in a working-class urban environment.

Koko the Clown was actually “played” by Dave Fleischer himself – it was he in front of the camera that shot the action that would then be Rotoscoped into the cartoons – and when the Fleischers combined live-action and animated footage in the 1920’s they did so a lot more effectively and convincingly than Disney did. They soon attracted a major distributor, Paramount, and for about a decade the synergy between the scrappy cartoon producers and the big corporate studio worked well. The Fleischers got the freedom to innovate and produce quite inventive cartoons, and also to develop unusual characters – including Betty Boop, who at first was intended to be Minnie Mouse to the animal character Koko the dog, but as she developed after being introduced in a Koko short she became not only fully human but genuinely sexy. The character was based on the “boop-boop-a-doop” line from the song “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” a huge hit in the late 1920’s for singer Helen Kane, and reportedly Kane herself was the first voice of Betty Boop – though this documentary claims that Mae Questal (who lived into the 1990’s and played a small role in a Woody Allen movie, New York Stories, as well as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) was the voice of Betty Boop throughout the series. (Not so, says the one person who’s reviewed this film for imdb.com so far: that reviewer, Martin Hafer, says Margie Hines was the first audible Boopster in a Fleischer cartoon.)

Up until the mid-1930’s the Fleischers mostly developed their own characters, but that changed in 1936 when they bought the rights to a comic strip by E. C. Segar called Popeye the Sailor and adapted it into the most successful series they’d had to date. Mark Nassief credits the Popeye cartoons with starting the trend for cartoon violence that major studios like Warner Bros. and MGM picked up on in their later shorts. The Fleischers were also the first filmmakers to adapt Superman: they did a series of 13 seven-minute short movies based on the Man of Steel comics (which, since they were adapting a colored comic book rather than a black-and-white newspaper strip, they shot in color), and in 1939, two years after Walt Disney’s pioneering animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they made a feature of their own based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – or at least the first book of it. By this time the Fleischers had faced a strike among their animators and artistic personnel in general in New York City in 1937, and they decided to respond by relocating the company to Florida. There Paramount built them a state-of-the-art animation studio and the Fleischers used Paramount’s money to lure as many of the staff who wanted to relocate to do so. Alas, the combination of the expenses involved in moving the operation and getting the personnel settled and the money required to make feature-length animated films got the Fleischers more and more in hock to Paramount.

In 1941 the Fleischers made their second – and, as it turned out, their last – animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town (later reissued as Hoppity Goes to Town), about a gang of insects in New York City who do what they need to to protect their habitat from being destroyed by the city’s human beings. Alas, they had the monumentally bad timing to release this film on December 7, 1941 – just as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the nation was plunged into World War II, and all of a sudden the movie market was no place for a whimsical fairy tale in which insects were the heroes and humans – American humans, at that – were the villains. In 1942 Paramount swooped in and took over the Fleischer Brothers’ studio, driving them out of it and forcing them to collect what work they could. Max and Dave ultimately found their way to Hollywood and worked at Columbia and Universal – where Dave became a drone in their special-effects department – while Leo was not so fortunate: one friend who’d known him in the glory days was embarrassed and heartbroken for him when he found Leo in a line of people applying for unemployment insurance. Paramount also “unpersonned” the Fleischers, removing their names from the credits of their films – Max and Dave ultimately filed suit to have their credits restored, but they waited too long and their case was thrown out for being over the statute of limitations – and while the Popeye series continued under “Associated Artists Productions” (a company formed by Paramount and King Features Syndicate, which owned the rights to Segar’s original comic strip), they were relatively dull and utterly lacked the visual inventiveness that had made the Fleischer Popeyes so entertaining. (One scene I particularly remember from a Popeye film called “The Two-Alarm Fire” features two flames from a fire meeting on the roof of a house and shaking hands, the sort of physically impossible gag Disney forbade at his studio.) About the one ray of light in this rather sad story came when Walt Disney hired Max Fleischer’s son Richard to direct the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Richard arranged a meeting between his dad and his once-hated rival Disney that led to an unlikely friendship for the last 12 years of Walt Disney’s life.