Born: Majer Fleischer
Birthday: July 19, 1883
Location: Kraków, Poland
Alma mater: Art Students League of New York
Occupation: Director, Producer
Years active: 1918–1962
Died: September 25, 1972

Max Fleischer was born in Krakow, Austria-Hungary before his family emigrated in 1887 to the United States. They settled in New York City where Fleischer learned commercial art at the Cooper Union. His formal art training was from the Art Students League of New York under George Bridgman. Max also received technical training at Mechanics and Tradesman’s School.

Max was hired by The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper as an errand boy. He worked his way up through a variety of positions at the paper; photographer, photoengraver, and a staff cartoonist eventually penning the comic strips Little Algie and S.K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend.

Fleischer’s technical schooling combined with his artistic nature as he left the newspaper to work as a technical illustrator, a catalog illustrator, and the art editor for Popular Science magazine. From 1914 to 1917 Max developed and was granted a patent for the rotoscope; a device to assist artists tracing images from live-action film.

Max and his brother Dave Fleischer produced 62 animated shorts for the Out of the Inkwell series. They featured an animated Koko the Clown interacting with his live-action artists and whatever they drew. The Fleischer brothers soon hired experienced animator Dick Huemer, who lent a more fluid quality to the films.

One of Fleischer’s investing partners was the inventor of a method to produce sound-on-film recordings for films. Max got to use this Phonofilm process, and experimented with making animated short films with sound. My Old Kentucky Home was the first example of animated lip-synch. Fleischer produced 19 such early sound films.

Fleischer co-founded the Fleischer studios in New York by 1929, producing sing-along animated shorts called Screen Songs. An animated ball bounced over lyrics, teaching moviegoers various popular songs.

Betty Boop first appeared in the Fleischer short Dizzy Dishes rocketing to stardom. By 1932, she had her own series, starring in 90 films and making guest-appearances in another 36 films before 1933. During the same period, Fleischer acquired the licensing rights to the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor, whose popularity earned a film series of his own, appearing in 109 shorts prior to 1942.

Fleischer Studios introduced its first color cartoons in 1934, but due to limited funding from their parent company, Paramount Pictures, could not afford the three-color Technicolor. Instead, Fleischer’s used the limited red and blue two-color processes of Cinecolor and the red and green Two-Color Technicolor method.

Max patented the use of 3D effects in animation in the mid-‘30s by combining animation with miniature sets. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves utilized this Stereoptical Process.

After the box office success of Disney’s feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fleischer began work on a feature film of his own, Gulliver’s Travels. With this major project underway, the Fleischer Studios moved its operations from New York to Miami, Florida. The move combined with the film production began to strain the personal and professional relationships of brothers and business partners Max and Dave Fleischer.

Gulliver’s Travels grossed over $3 million dollars at the U.S. box office, but Paramount reaped most of the money, leaving Fleischer’s in debt. The studio spun-off a series of cartoon shorts starring Gabby, the town crier from Gulliver’s. The Gabby cartoons were financially unsuccessful, driving Max to find another series.

He licensed to the superhero character Superman, and created 9 animated short films between 1941 and 1942. The series was popular, but expensive to produce.

The release of his studio’s second animated film, Mr. Bug Goes to Town was delayed due to the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. By the time it premiered months later, it was yet another a financial failure.

After so many losses, and with debt mounting, Max was forced to resign, Paramount took ownership of the Fleischer animation studio and its characters, and the studio was re-organized into the Paramount’s Famous Studios.

Max found work for the Detroit-based The Jam Handy Organization as their animation department’s head, overseeing the animated World War II training films for the U.S. Army and Navy. While at Handy, he personally directed 1948’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; the first animated adaptation of the Christmas story.

Fleischer left in 1953 to become a production manager at Brayco, the successor of the Bray Productions animation studio. There, Max produced their filmstrips.

He achieved a victory of sorts in a 1955 lawsuit against Paramount Pictures. While Paramount still held the rights to re-release most of Max’s former films, the court decided that they did not have the right to remove the Fleischer name from the credits.

Starting Out of the Inkwell Films in 1958, a new animation studio, he and partner Hal Seeger, set out to revive the old Out of the Inkwell format as a color television series. Together, they produced 100 new episodes between 1960 and 1961 until Max Fleischer retired in 1962 at the age of 79.