Studio: Out of the Inkwell Films
Short Synopsis
Max Fleischer sits at his desk to work, but every time he dips his pen into the inkwell the nib comes out missing. Someone inside the inkwell is stealing them: the clown, who lives in there between cartoons. Max fishes him out and tells him to let him finish his drawing and go back where he came from. The clown has other ideas. He leaps on to his favourite spot, the drawing paper, and refuses to leave. Max tries to get rid of him with an exit door drawn on the page, labelled "Exit, this means you!", and when that fails he tries to rub the clown out altogether. Each time, the clown finds his way back through the paper, swinging on the rings and trapeze Max has drawn, until the struggle spills off the page and on to the desk beside the inkwell itself.
Why It Matters
- The film is a duel between an artist and his own creation, and both sides cheat. The clown, rotoscoped from Dave Fleischer's movements, moves with an eerie fluidity against the flat paper, while Max's real hands and real ink bottle loom over him, so the boundary between photographed desk and drawn page is the joke itself.
- It is a fine example of the formula that made Out of the Inkwell one of the most inventive series of the silent era. The game of the cartoon character rebelling against the animator influenced later films about drawn characters talking back, from the Fleischers' own Betty Boop shorts to Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck (1953).
Notes and Trivia
- The clown was not yet called Koko; the name came a few years later.
- The rotoscope that gave the clown his lifelike motion was patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, with Dave as the model in a clown suit.
- See also: The Tantalizing Fly (1919).