Before Walt Disney‘s successes of the 1930s, the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer dominated the market for cartoons. Max, the older of the two, revolutionised the production of animated films in 1914 with the invention of a device called Rotoscope. Up until then, every single picture was created individually – a lengthy process by which the production of a short film would take several months.  Rotoscope lead to a dramatic increase in efficiency and simplified the creation of realistic motion sequences. Finally, the Rotoscope also allowed for a combination of cartoon and performed storyline which became a trademark of the early films from the house of Fleischer.  Their first significant figure was Koko the Clown, modelled after the younger brother Dave, who at the time still worked as a clown in Coney Island. The matinee will be showing seven short films from the early ‘Out of the Inkwell’ series.