Fleischer Cartoons: New York Stories

Film

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Any Rags?. 1932. Directed by Dave Fleischer, produced by Max Fleischer. Courtesy of FleischerToons.

Stop That Noise. 1935. DCP. 6 min.
Any Rags?. 1932. DCP. 6 min.
Betty Boop's Penthouse. 1933. DCP. 7 min.
Minnie the Moocher. 1932. DCP. 8 min.
Noise Annoys Koko. 1929. DCP. 6 min.
A Dream Walking. 1934. DCP. 7 min.
On With the New. 1938. DCP. 7 min.
Koko At the Circus. 1926. DCP. 5 min.

In the 1920s, Fleischer Studios set up shop in midtown Manhattan (first at 129 E. 45th Street, later at 1600 Broadway), and indeed this selection of cartoons reflects a city-kid sensibility that’s starkly different from the sunny pastoralism Disney was beaming from out West. Any Rags? depicts an urban center overrun with beggars (plus the usual ensemble of felines, fish, cops, hippos…and Koko the Klown.) Minnie the Moocher, one of the Fleischers’ masterpieces made in collaboration with Cab Calloway, details Betty’s home life caught between the demands of her immigrant parents (squabbling in an unmistakably European gibberish patois). And the 1934 Popeye cartoon A Dream Walking is a riotous portrait of tenement squalor, as the Sailor Man and his archrival Bluto compete for the affections of a sleepwalking Olive Oyl, building to a precarious showdown on a skyscraper construction site.

This film accompanies Fleischer Cartoons: The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer.

Past events

Thu, Mar 14, 2024, 6:30 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 6:30 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

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