Koo Koo About KoKo

One can debate which cartoon character was the first animation superstar, but there’s no denying the Fleischer brothers’ KoKo (or Ko-Ko, depending on who was suing who at any given moment) ranks as one of the best of the silent and early sound eras.

There’s not enough space to give an adequate recap on the legendary Fleischer brothers (Max and Dave, with uncredited help from brothers Charles, Louis, and Joe) and their various studios.  Suffice it to say despite their undeniable creative and technical innovations (all apparently inherited their father William’s talent for invention), their bad business deals and even worse business partners marred their professional collaboration followed by two expensive animated feature misfires and their own notorious family feuds.

The Fleischer studios -- as an independent collaborative family effort -- evaporated in the 1940s with Paramount scooping up the remaining talent under the banner of Famous Studios.  Max and David never spoke to each other after that and while many of the extended Fleischer family stayed in the animation business, they never again came close to the soaring heights where they once rivalled Disney.

But during their golden age…oh, my.  Betty Boop remains an iconic character even despite virtually no media presence in decades.  While they didn’t create Popeye or Superman, their takes on those characters forever cemented their pop culture identities.

But that powerhouse trio of animation icons rank as johnny-come-latelies, riding to their own justifiable fame and fortune atop the shoulders of one originally anonymous clown, later named KoKo (unless defending him from a trademark challenge, in which case he became Ko-Ko).

KoKo is a direct result of the Fleischer brothers’ genuine inventiveness, in this instance the process of rotoscoping, which Max Fleischer developed in 1916 along with brothers David and Joe.

Max’s idea was simple:  Put brother David in a clown costume then trace him doing various acrobatics and tricks.  This drastically sped up the animation process for relatively simple actions such as running or walking while at the same time giving animators enough freedom to distort the character as they saw fit.

And boy, did they ever see fit!  Koko proved to be a huge hit with audiences because his series of cartoons (best known as Out Of The Inkwell though sometimes it was called The Inkwell Imps or Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes) not only captured the delightful and now virtually lost anarchic spontaneity of early animation, but because KoKo himself proved to be an enduring character.

Despite being a clown (or then again, perhaps because of it), KoKo came across as his own person, an adult with adult passions and appetites and a mind of his own.

The Out Of The Inkwell series typically begin with Max dipping a pen into an inkwell and drawing KoKo on a sheet of paper set up on his easel (any of you born after 2000 can just Google these terms).

KoKo would then come to life and either be set to some task by Max or more typically, rebel against his creator’s wishes and go off with ideas of his own, frequently besting his creator in the process.

Yeah, there’s a theological underpinning to these cartoons.  Like quantum particles, you can’t look at it directly or it goes away, but it’s there.

The Fleischers either created or speedily adapted a wide range of techniques in addition to rotoscoping.  They animated backgrounds to create the sensation of moving through an environment, they created a rival to Disney’s multiplane animation camera that placed animated characters in moving three dimensional backgrounds, they incorporated pixilation (animating real people and objects) a generation before Norman McLaren did, and they figured out how to get animated characters to interact more directly with live action performers.

By contrast, Disney’s Alice In Cartoonland series simply tore a hole in sheets of animation paper and put cut out photos of the child actress behind them, making her present as the cartoon characters performed their antics but not really a participant.

All the silent and early sound era animated cartoons inhabit a world dominated by panpsychism, where every single object displays its own independent spirit and mind.

This is not the same thing as The Flintstones (where the prehistoric equivalent of modern appliances are actually living creatures forced into those roles ala “Eh, it’s a living”) or The Jetsons (where many futuristic devices are indeed sentient, being built and programmed that way to interact with human beings).

Rather, it’s a reality where not only does each and every object possess life, intelligence, and will, but if such objects are shattered or dismembered, each component part displays its own unique personality and motive.

And to revisit the theological underpinning of the Inkwell series, KoKo is aware he’s actually a cartoon!  Never for an instant does he presume he isn’t drawn literally out of an inkwell and at the beck and call of a domineering creator.

To this degree, KoKo may be the single most realistic character ever shown on film as he knows he’s nothing more than a created image.

This is what makes all early cartoons -- but especially the KoKo cartoons -- so fascinating and delightful to me.

A little bit of this carried over into the early sound era, but by the start of WWII the world/s that animated characters inhabited became fixed and “real” insofar as they didn’t spring magically to life without warning.

Oh, characters stretched and squished, got blown up or flattened by steam rollers, but with very, very few exceptions their environments remained inert.  When cartoon reality got distorted, a clear cause and effect explained why; it simply didn’t just happen because reality felt like making it happen.

I could go on and on and on and on, but I want to leave a list of KoKo cartoons for you to enjoy and see why I’m so enthusiastic about them.

The earliest Inkwells traced David Fleischer’s clown white face closely, giving the clown (as KoKo was called then) a realistic appearance.  This became a bit more stylized in the early 1920s but in 1923 KoKo received a major make-over that kept him in his original costume but thanks to the Fleischers’ steadily improving rotoscoping and animation chops, gave him a more cartoony appearance (KoKo is one of the few early cartoon characters to have five fingers).

What marked the Fleischers’ efforts distinctive from Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons of the same era is that they more fully embraced the immigrant experience than the other two, who focused mainly on middle American values.  Despite the Fleischers’ clear sympathy for the immigrant (Max and Charles’ parents brought them to America in 1887 with the rest of the brothers born here) they also play into stereotypes of the era.

This is especially true with an African-American janitor who appears in the live action portions of a few Inkwell cartoons (and as late as 1938 with a Betty Boop cartoon called Out Of The Inkwell).  It sadly comes as no surprise this is not a particularly enlightened portrayal; on the other hand, the character behaves no sillier than Max and David and other actors and actresses in the live action portions.  Be advised.

There are literally hundreds of KoKo cartoons to choose from, but I’ll limit myself to ten silents that best display his talents.  Leaning heavily into the Fleischers’ love of inventions and technology, these often tend to have a somewhat science fictional tone to them.

• Fishing (1921) -- KoKo’s undersea adventure.

• Invisible Ink (1921) -- Max draws objects with invisible ink yet KoKo still interacts with them.

• Mechanical Doll (1922) -- shows KoKo falling in love with a robot character Max Fleischer creates, and may be the first use of the acetone dissolving animation characters gag later used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

• Bed Time (1923) -- Kaiju KoKo.

• Trip To Mars (1924) -- wot it sez.

• KoKo In 1999 (1924) -- KoKo travels into the future (our past); surprisingly, they got a lot of guesses right.

• The Cure (1924) -- Max and KoKo both suffer from severe toothaches.  The climax features laughing gas escaping into the real world and literally getting cars and buildings to convulse with laughter.  Later remade as the 1934 Betty Boop cartoon Ha! Ha! Ha! and incorporating some of the original live action footage.

• The Cartoon Factory (1925) -- Max creates a cartoon making machine that turns out a version of himself as a toy soldier who promptly goes to war with KoKo.

• KoKo’s Haunted House (1928) -- David Fleischer draws a simple shape on paper that he then stretches with his fingers to become a model haunted house.  Max sends KoKo in to explore it, encountering weirdness that prefigures the 1931 Betty Boop cartoon, Bimbo’s Initiation.

• KoKo’s Earth Control (1928) -- KoKo and a big lever marked “Do Not Touch - Earth Control” that will end the world if thrown.  What could possibly go worng?

 . . .

Temporarily sidelined for three years due to a rights dispute, KoKo lost his star status first to Bimbo (who evolved from KoKo’s more overtly canine companion Fritz from the latter silent Inkwell cartoons) then both of them become supporting players to Betty Boop, the Fleischers’ only original breakout character of the sound era.

KoKo’s first sound cartoon appearance came in 1931’s The Herring Murder Case which attempted to recapture the anything-goes style of the silent era.  Though it features a number of good gags, it comes across more frantic than funny.  By the time Betty Boop became their leading lady, the Fleischer studio settled down into more carefully paced storytelling, one with traces of the silent era but already starting to solidify into the modern era’s style of animation.

• Boop Oop A Doop (1932) logically enough puts Betty, Bimbo, and KoKo in a circus where he defends Betty from a Bluto-sized villain and gets a romantic clinch with her in the end.

• Chess-Nuts (1932) portray him and Bimbo as living chess pieces in a game where Betty is their queen.

• I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You (1932) shows its age with its stereotypical portrayal of savage natives, but at the same time puts Betty, Bimbo, and KoKo through some pretty amazing and amusing situations.  Cringeworthy for anyone other than an animation historian, it features a fine musical performance by Louis Armstrong.

• Betty Boop's May Party (1933) shows him as one of hundreds of guests in a virtually plotless cartoon that just strings dozens of surreal gags together.

• Snow White (1933) offers the Fleischer’s Betty Booped version of the famous fairy tale with probably the clown’s most famous appearance, Cab Calloway’s singing and dancing providing the rotoscoped basis for KoKo’s classic rendition of “St. James’ Infirmary Blues”. 

KoKo’s last theatrical -- and only Technicolor -- appearance came in 1949’s “follow the bouncing ball” cartoon (another Fleischer invention) Toys Will Be Toys as a brief blink-and-you-miss-it cameo part of a toy parade in a red costume.  Made by Famous Studios (the aforementioned remnants of the original Fleischers’ studio), Max Fleischer did not participate in the production due to family estrangement although his son-in-law Seymour Kneitel directed it.

In 1960 Max Fleischer cut a TV deal to make a series of short Out Of The Inkwell cartoons featuring KoKo in a blue costume along with a new supporting cast.  Jobbed out to a cut rate animation company, these look dreadful and Max himself hated the final product.  I link to the pilot short East Side West Side (another follow the bouncing ball cartoon) as it is the least awful of these and the only one that comes even remotely close to the magic of the originals.

Finally, to complete this overview, we’ll note his almost unrecognizable brief cameo in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit;  the 1989 CBS Betty Boop Movie Mystery, a 24-minute US / Chinese co-production made by people with sincere intent but a complete lack of understanding as to what made the original cartoons so wonderful; and 1992’s Dutch produced short Back To The Inkwell which deconstructs the original series but does so in a manner far closer to the source material than either of the other two.

Bottom line:  Should we bring KoKo back?

Hell, no!

You can’t catch lightning in a jar twice, especially if it ain’t your lightning or jar to begin with.

He’s a product of his time and circumstances.  We may not possess all his appearances and the ones we do may often be in poor condition, but we got all we need to appreciate his quirky character and the Fleischers’ incredible imagination.

We don’t need more. 

Draw on KoKo
for inspiration,
but move on.

© Buzz Dixon

I drew on several resources for this post, including The Fleischer Story by Leslie Cabarga and the official Fleischer Studios web site at www.FleischerStudios.com, both highly recommended.