2. Max Fleischer (July
19, 1883 – September
11, 1972) was
an American animator, inv
entor, film director and
producer.
Born to a Jewish family
in Krakow, Poland, then
part of the Austrian-
Hungarian province
of Galicia, Max Fleischer
was the second oldest of six
children of an Austrian
immigrant tailor, William
Fleischer.His family
emigrated to the USA in
1887 and settled in New
York City, where he
3. While still in his teens, he worked for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle as an
errand boy, and eventually became a cartoonist. It was during this
period he met newspaper cartoonist and early animator, John
Randolph Bray. He married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel (Essie)
Gold on December 25, 1905. Shortly afterward he accepted an
illustrator's job for a catalogue company in Boston. He returned to New
York as Art Editor for Popular Science magazine around 1912; he also
wrote books, including one called Noah's Shoes. Fleischer devised a
concept to simplify the process of animating movement by tracing
frames of live action film. His patent for the Rotoscope was granted in
1915, although Max and his brother Dave Fleischer made their first
cartoon using the system in 1914. Extensive use of this technique was
made in Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series for the first five years of
the series, which started in 1919 and starred Koko the Clown and Fitz
the dog.
4. Max Fleischer created such animations as:
Betty boop
Pop eye the sailor
Superman
Olive oly
Gulliver's travels
KO KO the clown
pudgy
Bimbo
Grampy
And many more ...
5. The company had its start when Max Fleischer invented
the rotoscope, which allowed for extremely lifelike animation. Using this
device, the Fleischer brothers got a contract with Bray Studio in 1919 to
produce their own series called Out of the Inkwell.
Using the rotoscope machine, he was responsible for a realism never seen
in an animation film, as in the series Superman in 1941. Soon after, he
invented another machine called Rotograph, where he turned possible the
inclusion of real scenes as animations background. Fleischer developed
also a new methodology where the characters could be placed in a 3D
environment. His first film using this technique was ‘Poor Cinderella’, a
film of the character Betty Boop and just after with the first coloured
animation Popeye.
Without a doubt the rotoscope is the most polemic animation technique
of the last times. Since its invention until current days, we can see
comments about animation fluidity quality and authorship, once it could
be considered a copy of a scene. To guarantee the sales of their
animations, several studios deny even today its use. However, the
rotoscope has been used for several decades in great movies successes, as
“Terminator II”, when the T-1000 leaves the elevator and persecutes the
heroes. In this scene, the rotoscope was used so that the 3D character
7. Max Fleischer draws Betty, then leaves her for the night in
the studio. Koko escapes from the inkwell and helps
himself to a candy bar left behind by Max. He soon gets a
terrible toothache. Betty tries to perform some
amateur dentistry on Koko, but uses too much laughing
gas. The laughing gas spreads the room, making a cuckoo
clock and a typewriter laugh hysterically. The laughing gas
then goes out the window and spreads into town. Both
people and inanimate objects begin laughing
hysterically, including (a mailbox, a parking meter, a
bridge, cars and graves) The short ends when Betty and
Koko get back in the inkwell, and it begins laughing, but
although it gets tired from laughing.
