Max and Dave Fleischer started in animation in the silent era and continued into sound and through the heyday of short film animation. They were one of the few silent studios aside from that of Disney to last into the 1940s, continuing beyond studios like Van Buren or Ub Iwerks (though Iwerks did return to the Disney fold and work on animated films after his own studio folded). The Fleischer's created a number of characters of lasting value, two of the most notable being Betty Boop and Popeye, and form the silent era, Koko the Klown. Betty Boop was a character who epitomized a certain attitude in the Depression years, though in some ways she was out of her proper time and is more a flapper of the 1920s than the showgirl of the 1930s. She can be seen as evoking the sort of optimism needed in the years of the Great Depression, and much of her success derives form that sense of optimism along with her sexuality, something not usually seen in cartoon characters of either sex. an analysis of her creators and of some of her shorts shows how the Fleischers used all the elements of filmmaking to create a mood, to enhance a character, and to communicate a different perception of the world and of animation to the audience.
Max and Dave Fleischer were the founders of the animation studio that would be eventually called the Fleischer Studio. They were brothers from a family of inventors that had emigrated from Europe to New York in 1887. As a young man, Max Fleischer followed in the family business after a fashion by attending various trade schools and art programs in New York, but rather than become an inventor, he began working as a cartoonist, photographer, and photo engraver for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. He later worked as an art director for Popular Science magazine.
The Fleischers did work as inventors within the confines of their studio, and one of their most important patents was the rotoscope, a process by which...