You never know how something like this will work, but Lucas’ unusual project works spectacularly well. I’ve had the Fleischerei CD sitting on my desk for weeks and I only got around listening to it this past weekend as I was cleaning up around the house. It’s a delightful, toe-tapping, madcap and yes, very cartoony musical experience. Now if you’ve read this far, chances are that you have an interest in either Betty Boop or Max Fleischer’s work in general, so please allow me to call your attention to former Captain Beefheart/Jeff Buckley guitarist Gary Lucas’ latest release, Fleischerei: Music from Max Fleischer Cartoons, out now on Cuneiform Records. Trust me, you don’t have anything better to do for the next ten minutes than to watch Poor Cinderella. An ingenious tabletop animation process, in other words, at least partially.įor those of you reading this who are proficient in AfterEffects or 3D animation, imagine having to work like this! Clearly the Fleischer brothers were complete maniacs. Then the animation cels were placed within the setup so that the action could go around and among the sets.
Three-dimensional miniature sets were built to the scale of the animation artwork. What they did was use their own proprietary in house “Stereoptical” camera-called the “Setback”-which was developed that year. Yes, with all the other near-psychedelic eye candy going on here, pay careful attention to the backgrounds. One of the really impressive elements of Poor Cinderella-besides every single thing about it-is the way they did the backgrounds. Second, Max Fleischer was the inventor of the Rotoscope-he patented the process in 1915-which aided in animating movement by tracing frames of live action film. It’s like watching a moving stained glass window. A recent HD transfer-part of the Betty Boop: Essential Collection 4 Blu-ray-gives us a clear glimpse of what a perfectly cut diamond this artistically and historically important short animation truly is. Poor Cinderella has been in the public domain for many years, but always in scratchy, crappy-looking, less impressive versions. Again, it looks all the better for this, as you will see.
BETTY BOOP CARTOON FULL
It’s not so much a full color production, as one rendered in shades of black, white, blue and red. Walt Disney had locked up the rights to use Technicolor’s new 3-strip process from 1932 to 1935, but this limitation just makes the art direction look even better. That animation was then still a pretty young field-Max and Dave Fleischer were leaders in animation production, giving Walt Disney his first real competition-the insane amount of technical prowess that went into making Poor Cinderella (produced by Max, directed by Dave) reveals it to be all the more impressive.Ī celebrity cameo from famous crooner and radio personality Rudy Vallée, the Justin Bieber of the time.įirst off, the film was made with the two-strip Cinecolor process. If it came out in 2016 let alone 1934, Poor Cinderella would be considered an absolute masterpiece. Although in the 1980s several Betty Boop cartoons were colorized-quite sloppily I might add-of her “classic era” it was just Poor Cinderella that was actually planned from the start to be a color film.Īnd. Male cartoon characters with black hair.Of all the 110 Betty Boop shorts made by the Fleischer Studios between 19 (she was also seen in many of the Fleischer brothers’ earlier “Talkartoons”) only one of them- Poor Cinderella-was made in color.
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