Out of the Inkwell

Max Fleischer sits at his drawing table and dips a pen, and the clown climbs off the page into the room and picks a fight with the eraser. The clown moves like a body because he was one: Dave Fleischer in a clown suit was filmed for the rotoscope, Max's machine for tracing live action frame by frame. American animation finds out here that it can think about itself. 1919, six minutes, the start of a series that ran a decade.