MoMA brings classic Fleischer cartoons to the screen

The Museum of Modern Art shall be operating a collection of works from a well-known animation pioneer subsequent week. Fleischer Cartoons: The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer is exhibiting from March 7-13, 2024.

The Fleischer Brothers created Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, amongst others. Their cartoon diversifications of E.C. Segar’s Popeye and DC Comics’ Superman are nonetheless standard. (Warner Bros. put out a Blu-ray re-release of the Superman shorts simply final yr.)

The cartoons shall be grouped, typically thematically — there are classes on New York tales and spooky tales — typically by format — musicals, silents, colour cartoons — and a few by character — with a spotlight session on the beginnings of Betty Boop. Matinees are supposed to be family-friendly.

Many of the applications embody discussions with these conversant in the work, together with Max Fleischer’s granddaughter Jane Fleischer Reid, restoration specialists, and Fleischer Studios artwork director Frank Caruso. Reid has supervised new 4K restorations for a lot of the materials, a few of which is making a world premiere throughout this occasion.

The full schedule could be discovered at the MoMA web site.

As the US approaches 100 years as an animation powerhouse, MoMA is thrilled to current a complete survey of classic cartoons by the Fleischer Brothers, who gained notoriety for his or her Jazz Age creations Betty Boop and Koko the Clown in addition to wildly standard screen diversifications of E. C. Segar’s Popeye and DC Comics’ Superman. In addition to family-friendly matinees, the collection will embody applications of historic and thematic groupings. Highlights embody Max Fleischer’s very early Koko the Clown silents, which famously mixed live-action hijinks with hand-drawn animation; applications highlighting the Fleischers’ cruel humorousness and profound eye for something phantasmagorical and transgressive, together with sound-era triumphs like the Betty Boop headliner Minnie the Moocher, that includes a ferocious rotoscoped efficiency from Cab Calloway; and the Technicolor two-reel masterpiece Popeye the Sailor Man Meets Sindbad the Sailor Man.