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29 Most examinations of the early films of Max and Dave Fleischer portray them as failed narratives, despite their considerable virtues in other areas. Leonard Maltin has characterized the Fleischer cartoons as examples of “raw, peasant humor . . . that relied more on technical ingenuity and comical invention than artistic expertise. There was no storyboard, just a general idea of what the picture was about.”1 Bob Baker’s criticism was based on his feeling that the Fleischer “films give the impression sometimes of having been made up as they went along, from cel to cel. The plots frequently take off in odd directions or just peter out altogether.”2 Animation history generally posits Disney’s narrative organization as the standard by which all animated films are compared. Good animation narrative is linear, unified, and coherent. Bad animation narrative (or at least, inferior animation narrative) is anything that doesn’t conform to this. The Fleischer films, on the whole, do not conform to this. Scholarly examinations of Disney’s work often attribute Disney’s tendencies toward mimesis, small-town or rural values, and linear, moralistic narratives to his boyhood in small towns and rural settings like Marceline and Kansas City or to the influence of American theatrical tradition.3 Animation historians tend toward evolutionary or teleological approaches in their examinations of narrative; the episodic, gag-oriented structures typical of early Fleischer films and those made by Fleischer contemporaries are seen as early stages leading up to the development of more coherent structures in the Disney product. This follows a tradition seen in work on early cinema in the immediate postBrighton period, where pre-1907 discontinuous narrative structures were seen as a developmental stage to more integrated, linear forms of expression.4 Just 2 Polyphony and Heterogeneity in Early Fleischer Films Comic Strips, Vaudeville, and the New York Style Mark Langer 30 Mark Langer as later examinations have contested this view of early cinema, this study will offer a differing analysis of the alterity presented by early Fleischer films. The Fleischers’ work was produced in a geographical area different from Disney’s and stemmed from other traditions in media, such as comic strips and vaudeville . Rather than viewing their films as failed or primitive projects in terms of narrative organization, I argue that the polyphonic and heterogeneous forms of expression seen in early Fleischer films grew out of the expressive practices , cultural milieu, and urban setting from which the studio and its artists originated. Later animated films relying on the discontinuous style inherent in polyphonic and heterogeneous structures (with their voices of multiple creative perspectives and disconnected arrangement of visual styles, narrative forms, etc.) that privilege separate visual gags over linearity are not naive holdovers from the primal era of animation; instead, they represent both the deliberate continuation of media traditions and the effusion of a specific ethnocultural context.5 Both the traditions and context were related, in large part, to the Fleischers’ background in early twentieth-century New York City, which differed dramatically from traditions in the Midwest that resulted in Disney’s “West Coast” style of animation. New York City’s status as the birthplace of American animation is indisputable . Through the 1910s and 1920s the city and surrounding area was home to dozens of animation companies—Associated Animators, Bray Studios, the Bud Fisher Films Corporation, Celebrated Players, Earl Hurd Productions, Fables Pictures, Carpenter Goldman Studio, Harry Palmer, International Film Service, the Jefferson Film Corporation, Macdono Cartoons, Out of the Inkwell Films, the Pat Sullivan Studio, and the Tony Sarg Studio—all of which were practitioners of a similar style of animation.6 The Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell Films and its later incarnation, Fleischer Studios, became the most successful and longest-lived of animation businesses that used what has become known as the “New York style” of animation. New York–style animation preceded and later existed in opposition to a more realistic “West Coast style,” which developed during the late 1920s through the 1930s at studios like Walt Disney Productions, Harman-Ising, and Ub Iwerks’ Celebrity Productions. The earlier New York style had a number of characteristic features that stemmed partly from the location of the industry and partly from the nature of the early careers of its first participants. Most early New York studios were founded by practitioners of newspaper and magazine cartooning and illustration, such as Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend), Raoul Barré (Les contes du Père Rhault), John Bray (Little...

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