Hans Held's Troublemaker, a real Nazi cartoon. Courtesy of William Moritz

The Darling of Audiences
Fischerkoesen made a successful advertising film, Bummel-Petrus (Strolling Peter, 1921), for the Leipzig shoe factory Nordheimer, which led to a two-year contract with Julius Pinschewer, who had pioneered the use of animated commercials in movie theaters back in 1911. Afterwards, he established his Fischerkoesen Studio in Leipzig to specialize in advertising films, something Fischerkoesen seemed perfectly suited to. After all, he had an irrepressible sense of humor, a good sense of rhythm, and a charming, flexible cartoon style--as well as the obsessive concentration necessary to make animated films perfect in every way. He also had the knack for seeing a pun or twist in some old saying, common situation or popular song which would fit right in with a product. He philosophized about advertising, proposing the "if-then" formula (If you use this product, then this will happen; if you have this problem, then this product will help) as the best format for a succinct, cogent ad.

In 1931, a Leipzig newspaper celebrated Fischerkoesen, "the darling of audiences," with a full-page article entitled "Watch out, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, and Co.!" which contains delightful images of a cow with a lyre built into her horns, a bull in a tuxedo, and an enchanting art deco-style kangaroo ballet--all popular cartoon figures from his ads. By 1937, when he won both first and second prizes at a Dutch-sponsored international competition for advertising films (the runners up included George Pal and Alexander Alexeieff), Fischerkoesen had made around 1,000 publicity films. Unfortunately, all but a few of these seem to be lost, or languish unidentified in collections that do not consider commercials important.

For many years, Hans Fischerkoesen managed to keep his production confined to the kind of advertising films he did so well. But after the 1941 edict, the Propaganda Minister demanded that he move his staff and studio to Potsdam, near UFA's Neubabelsberg studios, to be available for consultations and special effects on features and documentaries. When the 45-year-old Fischerkoesen, loathe to become any more closely involved with Goebbels than necessary, protested that he didn't really have the talent to invent ideas for story films, he was assigned to work with 35-year-old Horst von Möllendorf, a popular Berlin newspaper cartoonist who had just been "drafted" to work as a gag man for animated cartoons. (Although Möllendorff received story credit on several of Fischerkoesen's wartime films, his contribution was negligible: the credit for these films rests solely with Hans and Leni Fischerkoesen.)

Among the specific things that Goebbels mandated for the new German cartoon industry was the development of "three-dimensional" effects which could be competitive with the Fleischers' Stereo-Optical process (which combined model sets with cel animation) or Disney's multiplane camera (which filmed several layers of cels). Fischerkoesen had already been using a simple multiplane effect derived from the multilayered glass animations that Lotte Reiniger used in the 1926 animated feature Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926). Fischerkoesen had also been working with puppet and model animation, and could hardly have been ignorant of Oskar Fischinger's brilliant simulation of a deep-space traveling boom shot around the Muratti cigarettes parading towards the Olympic stadium in his classic 1934 ad film Muratti Gets in the Act.