FLEISCHER STUDIOS (Gulliver's Travels)

Animation's history may now be dominated by Disney but many of its techniques were pioneered by Max Fleischer's rival studio, which invented the characters of Popeye and Betty Boop and was the first to animate Superman.

Max Fleischer was an important technical and artistic innovator and the leading proponent of the New York style of animation, in which the artificial, drawn nature of the medium is dominant. 

His films were ethnically inflected, reflecting the largely Jewish and Italian composition of his staff, and even in the area of narrative, where most historians credit Disney as the great innovator, he broke considerable new ground, paving the way for the Bugs Bunny cartoons and influencing such present-day film-makers as Hayao Miyazaki. 

Born in 1883 in Vienna, Fleischer emigrated with his Jewish family to New York City at an early age, studying art at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. He worked as a commercial artist and cartoonist, but an interest in mechanics led him to animation. Specifically, he was driven to find a method to produce animation more efficiently and economically, which resulted in the invention with his brothers Dave and Joe of the rotoscope, a device used to trace movement from live-action film. The process was demonstrated in his first film, Experiment No. 1 (1915), in which Dave posed as the clown who became known as KoKo.

Max Fleischer

1883 - 1972