In 1900 Max began to work as an errand boy at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By 1904 he was a staff artist.
In 1905 he married his childhood sweetheart, Essie Gold; they had two children. After he left the Eagle, Max briefly did artwork for two companies and then became art editor of Popular Science Monthly in 1914. There his childhood interest in mechanical matters was reignited.
In fact, it was a mechanical problem that pulled Max Fleischer into the field of animation. Early animation was frequently very choppy. Max theorized that if live-action footage were traced, frame by frame, fluid motion could be achieved. He enlisted the help of his brothers Dave and Joe, and the three developed the Rotoscope, a camera mounted under a piece of frosted glass with a crank to advance the film, so each frame could be traced.
It took the brothers a week to build the Rotoscope, but it was a full year before they finished their first cartoon. Dave donned a clown suit, and Max and Joe filmed him. Then they traced the clown on the Rotoscope. Work on the cartoon was completed in 1916, and a patent for the Rotoscope came through a year later.
FROM http://anb.org/articles/20/20-01567.htmlThe Fleischers put popular, modern music at the center of many of their films, building entire cartoons around jazz legends such as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Don Redman. These cartoons often featured the Fleischers’ signature
combination of live action and animation; in fact the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway in performance can be seen in the Fleischer classic Minnie the Moocher.
In 1929 the Studio made a major agreement with Paramount that would allow Paramount to distribute all Fleischer films. That same year the Studio changed its name to ‘Fleischer Studios.’
FROM http://www.fleischerstudios.com/history.html
OUT OF THE INKWELL~ https://youtu.be/KHDeCkDUNlk
Max Fleischer NEWS SKETCHES compilation~ https://archive.org/details/max_fleischer_news_sketches
Lambiek Comiclopedia~ https://www.lambiek.net/artists/f/fleischer_max.htm
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