Fleischer Lighting

"I never made love in Technicolor"

Before I take off for Annecy later this afternoon I’d like to do a short post about the use of realistic lighting using examples from two late Fleischer cartoons in Technicolor, both made down in Florida.
A longer article about the “imitation of lighting” in American animation will hopefully follow after the festival later this month.

Aladdin and his wonderful lamp (1939) is not only the last but at 22 minutes also the longest of the three Technicolor Popeye two-reelers. It isn’t the most imaginative though and there’s not a single shot done in the Fleischer’s then trademark “Stereoptical Process”.

I’d like to focus on one single scene that features colored light emitted by gems and diamonds:

First we see princess Olive’s room in natural high key lighting, similar to live-action color epics of the time.

Then Olive opens several boxes each holding a different colored gem inside. To emphasize the glowing effect of the stones, her whole room reflects each stone’s color. This may be unnatural but is a fairly accepted convention.

Let’s have a closer look at Olive in the red and especially the green picture: as expected, there is some modeling (light and shadow areas) on her body. But when in reality the side closer to the gem (her front) would have to be reflecting the stone’s color more strongly, it is exactly the other way round (especially in the green picture). Olive’s shadow side that in reality wouldn’t be green because her body would block out the green light is all green like the rest of the room. Of course, this goes unnoticed because it makes for a more readable image than had it been handled realistically. Not only is there more contrast of value in Olive than in her immediate surroundings, but she’s also the only thing in the picture that contrasts with the room’s overall color, most notably the spots of red, and she’s also wearing different colors. Her skintone is more or less “natural”.

I personally think that this unrealistic lighting effect makes for a far more interesting picture. Note that the white light in the third picture only bleaches out the surroundings and doesn’t affect colors too much. Here the framing bed looks even stronger than Olive. Naturally, seeing the scene in movement, Olive would still be the center of attraction.

Just to prove that unrealistic lighting must have clearly been a conscious artistic decision, let’s look at how the same people handled light sources and modeling in Superman a.k.a. The Mad Scientist (1941):

Right from the beginning, there is modeling on the characters. People working on these Superman shorts have repeatedly talked about how they tried to keep in mind where the principal light sources were located in every shot. And going through this first entry in the series shot by shot, you can see that they stick to it probably to a higher degree than anybody before them.

I will discuss the amazing color work and production design of these short in more detail later, because there really is a lot to admire in these films. But for now, just look at how realistically the lighting is handled in the following screen shots. The low key lighting itself is rather influenced by expressionistic live-action crime films of the time and therefore not realistic in the sense that it resembles the real world, but within the shots everything is totally coherent.


Now here we have the counterpart to the Olive scene from above: in Superman, even skintones are deeply affected by lighting changes, something that was quite uncommon in the early 40s.





Near the end of the short, there are several lightning flashes and explosions. With the characters already lit in colored light and shadow, the flashes had to really stand out. It’s amazing to see how the cel painters obviously painted on top of the cels in what looks like dry-brush or some frosted cel technique.


Of course, in the end the warm evening (or morning) colors take over again.

After managing to reserve most of the desired screenings despite the traditional breakdown of Annecy’s online ticketing system, I’m now really excited about the following week. I hope to see all of the shorts in competition and as many features as possible.

From Sita to the Fleischers

In my opinion, Sita sings the Blues owes more to the shorts of the Fleischer Studios than to any West Coast animated feature. Not that I think that Nina Paley is more interested in technical innovation than characters - God forbid, no! – but she uses the medium in visually playful ways rather than to present a closed classical narrative. Like the Fleischer Brothers many decades ago, she’s part of the New York animation scene that still seems to be rather different from the one in California.

Of course, when you see Sita sing for the first time, Betty Boop comes to mind immediately. Therefore it’s interesting to compare the two singing ladies in regard to construction.

Thanks to Grim Natwick’s drawing abilities – at least that’s what most people believe – Betty was already breaking out of the 1920s convention of characters built of mere circles and hoses. While the Fleischer animators struggled to give Betty more organic curves, Paley isn’t trying to hide the rigid Flash aesthetics. In fact, she goes in the opposite direction and exposes all the unnaturally perfect circles and ellipses, so that we never feel cheated. She sure knows how to handle cut-out animation.

It’s funny that Betty’s chest is not accentuated by the heavy black lines like all the other basic shapes. Well, times have changed and Sita is allowed to have a chest about as wide as her hips.
I particularly like the stylized eye lashes that correspond to her earrings and look both like miniature suns and cogwheels.

[Regrettably, I don’t have a more accurate Betty model sheet, so if someone has one, please let me know]


There is also a bouncing ball song towards the end of the movie. Although the bouncing ball has become the equivalent of sing along and karaoke videos, it was invented by Max Fleischer for his Song Car-Tunes series (1924-27).

One of my favorite Sita sequences also contains a rotoscoped dance. Both of these widely used devices are dissociated from their standard practice. They are not used for pure parody but help putting story points across.

It may sound a little farfetched to see Sita in the tradition of Max Fleischer only because he invented rotoscoping and the bouncing ball, but for me the whole setting of the Annette Hanshaw scenes makes me think of the Fleischers’ early jazz cartoons, where every now and then cartoon characters mouth the words sung by famous singers (off- or onscreen). There’s also an abundant buoyancy to these scenes where everything and everybody is dancing in rhythm from the palmtrees to the stars above and we often see characters multiplying and playing instruments in the middle of an action. This type of cartooning has been all but erased in the wake of Disney’s success with their rigid illusion-of-life dogma. There’s not too much possibility for morphing and the likes in cut-out, but the spirit of 1920s/30s animation is coming through all the same.