Max Fleischer

Walt Disney's main screen animation competitor in the 1930s and the creator, with brother Dave (1894-1979), of cartoon luminaries such as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Popeye. The brothers also made the famous silent "Out of the Inkwell" series which combined live actors with animation, and breathed life into features such as "Gulliver's Travels" (1939) and instructional films like "The Einstein Theory of Relativity" (1923) and "Darwin's Theory of Evolution" (1925). Fleischer made a significant contribution to animation technology with the Rotoscope, a machine that projected live-action film in such a way that animated characters could be traced directly from real-life figures.