AFS Cinema Celebrates Max Fleischer, the Man Who Made Betty Boop Boop-Oop-a-Doop

Boop-oop-a-doop! Max Fleischer's greatest creation is bringing all her friends back to the screen this weekend at AFS Cinema with the Fleischer Studios Legacy (courtesy of Fleischer Studios)

In animation history, Max Fleischer stands on a par with Walt Disney, and Looney Tunes masterminds Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. Creator of Betty Boop, inventor of the rotoscope, the producer who brought the four-panel funnies of Popeye the Sailor Man and four-color adventures of Superman to the silver screen: But to Jane Fleischer Reid, he was grandpa. "He loved drawing," she said, "and he was fascinated by invention and machinery."

Yet for many reasons – corporate double-dealing, time, changing tastes – his pivotal role in the birth of cartoons is often overlooked. Animation historian Ray Pointer explained, "The unfortunate thing is that everyone knows the work, but they don't know the man behind it. They all know Popeye and Betty Boop, but they don't know that Max Fleischer was connected to them as they connect Walt Disney to Mickey Mouse."

Now AFS Cinema will be reinforcing that connection with the Fleischer Studios Legacy, a weekend of screenings and conversations between Fleischer Reid and Pointer celebrating the animator's innovation, impact, and the joy that he brought to audiences around the world. In 2021, the Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored! initiative began the process of restoring the Fleischer Studios catalog from the best prints and negatives. It's a selection of those cartoons that will be shown – in fact, three selections. Betty Boop & Friends will highlight Fleischer's greatest creation; Family Fun will be an all-ages introduction to his work; and then there's Precode Rarities, spotlighting the wild and free jazz-era creativity that withered after the censorious Hays Code cracked down on what moralists saw as licentiousness and ghoulishness in cinema.

A cartoonist and illustrator by trade, Fleischer invented the rotoscope in 1915 (supposedly on a dare from his editor at Popular Science Monthly, Waldemar Kaempffert) as a way to smooth out early, jerky animation techniques. Rotoscoping – allowing animators to draw over live footage – sped up production, and quickly Fleischer Studios was producing dozens of shorts a year. This meant there are hundreds of Fleischer films, so the aim of Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored!, Fleischer Reid explained, "is to create as complete a library of all the Fleischer Studios cartoons as currently exists." However, that's an enormous challenge. Some are deteriorating in vaults, while even the cataloging process is a challenge, as some shorts were released under multiple titles, while different films were sometimes released with the same name. Fifteen of the 65 known Inkwell Imps shorts produced between 1927 and 1929 have disappeared. However, prints are still being found, with 10 of the Out of the Inkwell series recovered over the last decade, bringing the team closer than ever to finding all 90. "Somebody says, 'I found this weird cartoon under my bed, are you interested?' 'Yes!'"

It's a laborious process, but for Rockin Pins CEO and Fleischer superfan Mauricio Alvarado, it's worth the effort. He said, "What's amazing about those cartoons is how old they are, and how perfectly amazing the techniques are." Recently, the team got hold of a print of 1924's "Clay Town," which mixed Claymation, animation, and live-action footage. He said, "It's awesome to discover not just that Betty Boop stuff, the Popeye stuff, but his early stuff, and to show people what this guy created and what this team accomplished."

Help support Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored! at patreon.com/fleischertoons.

The Fleischer Studios Legacy