Max Fleischer (born Majer Fleischer ; July 19, 1883 – September 11, 1972) was an American animator and studio owner. Born in Kraków, in Austrian Poland, Fleischer immigrated to the United States where he became a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios, which he co-founded with his younger brother Dave. He brought such comic characters as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen, and was responsible for several technological innovations, including the Rotoscope, the "Follow the Bouncing Ball" technique pioneered in the Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes films, and the "Stereoptical Process". Film director Richard Fleischer was his son.
Majer Fleischer was born July 19, 1883, to a Jewish family in Kraków (then in the Austrian Partition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He was the second of six children of a tailor from Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Aaron Fleischer, who later changed his name to William in the United States, and Malka "Amelia" Pałasz. His family emigrated to the United States in March 1887, settling in New York City, where he attended public school. During his early formative years, he enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle, the result of his father's success as an exclusive tailor to high society clients. This changed drastically after his father lost his business ten years later. His teens were spent in Brownsville, a poor Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He continued his education at evening high school. He received commercial art training at Cooper Union and formal art instruction at the Art Students League of New York, studying under George Bridgman. He also attended the Mechanics and Tradesman's School in midtown Manhattan.
Fleischer began his career at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Beginning as an errand boy, he advanced to photographer, photoengraver, and eventually, staff cartoonist. At first, he drew single-panel editorial cartoons, but then graduated to the full strips "Little Algie" and "S.K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend". These satirical strips reflected his life in Brownsville and his fascination with technology and photography, respectively—both displaying his sense of irony and fatalism. It was during this period he met newspaper cartoonist and early animator, John Randolph Bray, who would later give him his start in the animation field.
On December 25, 1905, Fleischer married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel (Essie) Goldstein. On the recommendation of Bray, Fleischer was hired as a technical illustrator for the Electro-Light Engraving Company in Boston. In 1909 he moved to Syracuse, New York, working as a catalog illustrator for the Crouse-Hinds Company, and a year later returned to New York as art editor for Popular Science magazine under editor Waldemar Kaempffert.
By 1914, the first commercially produced animated cartoons began to appear in movie theaters. They tended to be stiff and jerky. Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from a live-action film. This device, known as the Rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. Although his patent was granted in 1917, Max and his brothers Joe and Dave Fleischer made their first series of tests between 1914 and 1916.
The Pathé Film exchange offered Max his first opportunity as a producer due in part to the fact that Dave had been working there as a film cutter since 1914. Max chose a political satire of a hunting trip by Theodore Roosevelt. After several months of labor, the film was rejected, and Max was making the rounds again when he was reunited with John R. Bray at Paramount Pictures. Bray had a distribution contract with Paramount at the time and hired Max as production supervisor for his studio. With the outbreak of World War I, Max was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to produce the first Army training films on subjects that included Contour Map Reading, Operating the Stokes Mortar, Firing the Lewis Machine Gun, and Submarine Mine Laying. Following the Armistice, Fleischer returned to Bray and the production of theatrical and educational films.
Fleischer produced his Out of the Inkwell films featuring "The Clown" character, which his brother Dave originated; he had worked as a sideshow clown at Coney Island. It was one of the later tests made from footage of Dave as a clown that interested Bray.
Fleischer's initial series was first produced at the Bray Studios and released as a monthly installment in the Bray-Goldwyn Pictograph Screen Magazine from 1919 to 1921. In addition to producing Out of the Inkwell, Max's position at Bray was primarily production manager, and supervisor of several educational and technical films such as The Electric Bell, All Aboard for the Moon, and Hello, Mars. And it was as production manager that Fleischer hired his first animator, Roland Crandall, who remained with him throughout the active years of Fleischer's studio.
Out of the Inkwell featured the novelty of combining live action and animation and served as semi-documentaries with the appearance of Max Fleischer as the artist who dipped his pen into the ink bottle to produce the clown figure on his drawing board. While the technique of combining animation with live action was already established by others at the Bray Studio, it was Fleischer's clever use of it combined with Fleischer's realistic animation that made his series unique.
In 1921, Max and Dave established Out of the Inkwell Films, Incorporated, and continued production of Out of the Inkwell through various states-rights distributors. "The Clown" had no name until 1924, when Dick Huemer came aboard after animating on the early Mutt and Jeff cartoons. He set the style for the series, redesigning "The Clown", and named him "Ko-Ko". Huemer created Ko-Ko's canine companion, known as Fitz, and moved the Fleischers away from their dependency on the Rotoscope for fluid animation, leaving it for special uses and reference points where compositing was involved. Because Max valued Huemer's work, he instructed Huemer to make just the key poses and have an assistant fill in the remaining drawings. Max assigned Arthur Davis as Huemer's assistant, making him the first inbetweener.
It was during this time that Max developed Rotoscoping, a means of photographing live action film footage with animation cels for a composited image. This was an improvement over the method used by Bray where a series of 8" x 10" stills were made from motion picture film and used as backgrounds behind animation cels. The Rotograph technique went into more general use as "aerial image photography" and was a staple in animation and optical effects companies for making titles and various forms of matte composites.
In addition to the theatrical comedy films, Fleischer produced technical and educational films including That Little Big Fellow and Now You're Talking for A.T.&T. In 1923, he made two 20-minute features explaining Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Charles Darwin's Evolution using animated special effects and live action.
In 1924, Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee de Forest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio. During this period, Fleischer invented the "Follow the Bouncing Ball" technique in his Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes series of animated sing-along shorts. In these films, the lyrics of a song appear on screen and theater patrons are encouraged to sing along with the characters. An animated ball bounces across the top of the lyrics to indicate when words should be sung.
Of the 36 Song Car-Tunes 12 used the De Forest Phonofilm sound-on-film process, the first of which was My Old Kentucky Home in 1926. This preceded Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which has been erroneously cited for decades as the first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation. The Song Car-Tunes series lasted until early 1927 and was interrupted by the bankruptcy of the Red Seal company—just five months before the start of the sound era.