Fleischer cartoons

Talk about animation from the Fleischer Bros. studio. Excepting Popeye, because there's a thread for his cartoons anyway. (I looked!)

The Fleischer studio turned out some of the best animation of the early 30s. From their surreal, trippy Betty Boop shorts to the hilarious Popeye cartoons to the "follow-the-bouncing-ball" fun of their Screen Songs, they made a ton of great, memorable pieces of film.

edited 14th Aug '14 9:06:22 AM by Aldo930

Mysterious Mose, Minnie the Moocher, Bimbo's Initiation, Dizzy Red Riding Hood, and Crazy Town are freaking amazing. So surreal, imaginative, and yet cute at the same time. Too bad it got toned down thanks to hays code

Popeye's also great. Very distinct voices, memorable characters, great backgrounds, etc. Too bad it got ruined by Famous Studios

Sigh. Fleischer cartoons are awesome. The way they declined is so tragic :(

edited 14th Aug '14 4:33:10 PM by Teddy

Don't forget Snow White. "Folks, I'm going down to St. James Infirmary..."

Or I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You, with the floating head of Louis Armstrong...

I'd also like to mention the Screen Songs, which are great examples of the long-lost art of sing-alongs before the movie. Yes, people did do this in the 30s.

Ooh! I love the one with Louis Armstrong. So absurd with an awesome musician to boot.

The one where dog-ear(ed) Betty sings You're driving me Crazy was a great cartoon too. I think it was called Silly Scandals.

people seem to forget a lot of the things the Fleischers did that was very impressive. Rotoscoping, Screen songs, etc. So ahead of their time technical wise!

edited 14th Aug '14 9:23:09 PM by Teddy

Gulliver's Travels and Mr.Bug Goes to Town were pretty good, too; the Fleisher's trying to get in on feature animation. Back in the early 80's Nickelodeon used to show those two films on the weekend fairly often.

Can't forget the Superman cartoons, either. Masterworks of action animation. At the time, the Fleishers were better at animating a realistic human figure than anyone else.

Does anyone have a copy of "Greedy Humpty Dumpty" that isn't all blurry?

Sorry dude. I could only find blurry copies :(

That's all right, at least you tried. Maybe someday we will get to see King Humpty spanked by sun-lightning in HD.

The Superman shorts. The studio managed to change to a (slightly) more serious tone, and made some incredible fighting animation with very good character designs, mechanical designs and storyboarding. It's pure action and power, but done well in short format. I like that they made Lois Lane into both an intrepid reporter and a damsel in distress.

However, the reasons why they could afford such high quality animation were lost within two decades. First, these were shorts for theatre, which would soon vanish and move to television with its much smaller budget. Secondly, this was the twenties, when it was possible to hire hundreds of skilled artists to simply draw the in-betweens in painstaking, repetitive work. After the boom of the fifties, better work was available.

Still an excellent legacy though.

Fourties. Not the Twenties.

They had the money to make such high quality animation because they grossly exaggerated the costs. When approached by National Periodical Publications to do a series of Superman shorts, the Fleischer Bros. did NOT want to do them; they thought they'd be too complicated. So when asked how much they thought each short would cost to produce, they quoted some ridiculous price (I can't remember exactly, but I think it was 1 million dollars a short). And they got it. To the Fleischer Bros. credit, it all ended up on the screen. The Superman shorts were beautiful, innovative, and groundbreaking. Hell, they did a feature article on the animation processes involved in those shorts in Scientific American.

Anyone else here ever seen their Screen Songs cartoons?

Not only are these probably the first recorded uses of the "follow-the-bouncing-ball" technique, there's a ton of surrealism and great old songs, a lot of which are now obscure. (Or relatively obscure.)

Famous Studios tried to revive the concept in the late 40s but it was never quite the same...

I've seen those. They tend to end up on a lot of those big public domain DVD cartoon collections (which do tend to be heavily Fleischer cartoons). It's a bit odd now thinking that they actually used to have singalongs in movie theaters...

Oh, like Frozen did!

Much like newsreels and cartoons they were a part of the moviegoing experience at the time. The only real evidence it survived are these and various WB cartoons that showed them ("Bosko's Picture Show" and "She Was an Acrobat's Daughter").

This one is probably the finest they produced:

Swing You Sinners stands as the most bizarre cartoon short I've ever seen, as well as one of the darkest. I think it beats out Porky in Wackyland in that the Porky cartoon actually has a coherent plot throughout.

I kinda think Minnie The Moocher is better. I mean, I have seen it, and it is strange, but Minnie The Moocher has a rotoscoped ghost walrus with the voice of Cab Calloway.

So there.

edited 3rd Sep '14 4:20:47 PM by Aldo930

I'll Be Glad When You're Dead beats both in strangest for me. I mean, you have a live action head of Louis Armstrong in the sky singing while the characters are away from savage natives. That alone is freaking bizarre

I didn't necessarily say Swing You Sinners was better than Minnie the Moocher, just more bizarre. Though I will admit it has pretty strong competition from other Fleischer shorts in that regard. I'll need to rewatch the Louis Armstrong one again it has been a while.

Also, I am a big Cab Calloway fan. I started the TV Tropes page on him.

Okay, as much as I love Fleischer cartoons, am I the only one who finds the endings to a lot of their cartoons, especially the earlier stuff, horribly rushed? I mean, I just watched a Betty Boop cartoon and the ending was so fast I didn't even notice it at first.. Like jammed pack fun and craziness then BAM! It's done. Leaving you wanting more..

edited 9th Sep '14 10:21:40 PM by teddy

The "leaving you wanting more" bit was probably the point. This was Bob Clampett's philosophy over at WB too; hit the last gag hard and iris out. When done well, it's great, when done poorly it does frequently feel rushed and sloppy.