The Fleischer Brothers - Animation Pioneers

Max & Dave Fleischer

The Fleischer brothers, and how they started in the world of animation is all here.

The American dream might read something like this:

Two brothers from a family of five, one an immigrant, one born soon after his mother sailed to New York and came through Ellis Island, rebel against their Old World parents, refuse to finish school, and instead enter the less-than-respectable world of movie-making in a less-than-respectable field: Animation.

Against all odds and expectations and due to an ingenious invention they do more than make good. They become Hollywood movie moguls with a studio which produces films starring some of the most famous leading actors of the 1930s, none of whom requires a salary or dressing room, and none of whom ever breaks a contract.

The Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, created and controlled one of the great 1930s sex symbols, animated Betty Boop.

Betty Boop's sexuality

Betty Boop in stockings

Betty's cartoons, remembered most vividly for their overt sexuality and often grotesque imagery, are even more provocative when viewed in relation to the lives of her working-class, Eastern European immigrant, Jewish creators. The Fleischer Brothers, in fact, provided America with some of its most memorable animated characters, including Popeye and his friends, and Superman.

They were also the creators of a series of technological apparatuses, including the rotoscope and 3-D sets, that provided the basis for all modern drawn animation until the advent of computer animation in recent years.

As well known as Disney (their main competitor) in the 1930s, by 1998 Max and Dave Fleischer only rated a short description (which omitted their names) in the documentary "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream" as the "Two Jewish brothers" who created the first film version of Superman.

Color footage of Betty the Pilot

Betty Boop as pilot in plane cockpit

A revival of interest in animation among film scholars has insured that the Fleischers' cartoons are more memorable than their names.