Max Fleischer

Cartoonist, inventor, and animated film producer, born in Vienna, Austria. He was taken to New York City at the age of four. He developed the rotoscope (1917), a device still used for transferring live action film into animated cartoon via tracing. With his brother Dave (1894–1979) he produced many Out Of The Inkwell films, which combined live action with animation. The brothers also created the ‘bouncing-ball’ sing along cartoons, silent but synchronized to the cinema orchestras. Having made the first experimental sound-on-film cartoons in the mid-1920s, Max went on to produce the Betty Boop Talkartoons (1930) and his best-remembered series, Popeye the Sailor (1933) from the strips by E C Segar, followed by the feature-length cartoons, Gulliver's Travels (1939) and Mr Bug Goes to Town (1941). His son, Richard Fleischer, became a film director.

Max Fleischer (July 19, 1883 – September 11, 1972) was an important Austrian-American pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon.

Born to a Jewish family in Kraków, then part of the Austrian province of Galicia, Fleischer was the second oldest of six children.

Fleischer had the idea of using frames of a live action film as the basis for drawing animation, his patent for the rotoscope was granted in 1917, although Max and Dave Fleischer made their first cartoon using the device in 1915. Extensive use of this technique was made in Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series, one of the highlights being a boxing match between the cartoon Koko the Clown and a live kitten.

In 1919 he established Fleischer Studios for producing animated cartoons and short subjects.

Fleischer produced the first sound animated cartoons in May 1924 using the Lee DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. (This was several years before Steamboat Willie (1928), which The Walt Disney Company says is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound, but makes no effort to imply as the first sound cartoon ever).

In 1923, Fleischer made a 50-minute animation film about Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Several of Fleischer's cartoons had soundtracks by (and often live or rotoscoped footage of) some of the leading jazz performers of the time, perhaps most notably Cab Calloway.

In 1938, Fleischer Studios moved from New York City to Miami, Florida to avoid pending unionization of the New York studios. On May 24, 1941, Paramount Pictures, taking advantage of a significant debt owed to them by Fleischer Studios, took over the studio and renamed it Famous Studios.

He later took a job of producing and directing the Handy Corporation's rare cartoon shorts, one of which was Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Fleischer left Handy in 1954 and went to Bray Studios (which he had worked for in 1916).

In his late years, Fleischer was poor and ended up living at the Motion Picture Country House, where he died from congestive heart failure in 1972.