Waking Life and Liquid Caricature
Perhaps it's natural that some of the few instances of interesting rotoscoping come from the technique's inventors, the Fleischer Brothers. They first used the technique for their character Koko the Clown, a creepy smooth-faced Pierrot -- and a habitual fugitive from an artist's ink bottle. Koko would start each episode either by unscrewing the bottle's cap from the inside, or by congealing himself out of a puddle of tipped jet India. The jittery liquid quality of the rotoscoped sequences is reminiscent of the shimmery wobble of spilled ink, as if Koko, once spilled, can't stop spilling.
Disney soon employed rotoscoping techniques for Snow White, to more distracting effect. The rotoscoped human characters in Snow White look like they come from a different universe than the Dwarves and animals — and what's worse, a far less interesting universe. It's a perfect visual distillation of the problem that dogs most fairytales, where the main protagonists are usually far duller than the intriguing side-characters who fill out the world's corners. Even when the human characters in Snow White strain for expressiveness, they seem reigned in: the rotoscoping smoothes away some of the particularities that might have otherwise been gleaned from the faces and bodies of the actors. Everything that has been subtracted from the actors is present, in heightened form, in the plastic (and wholly animated) features of the Dwarves.
Max Fleischer considered suing Disney for patent violation, but soon found out that another company had actually created something similar to the rotoscope, prior to the Fleischer patent. Fleischer still might have been able to sue, as that company had never filed a patent itself. But perhaps he'd developed some karmic appreciation for buried antecedents and their claims on legality; the Fleischer studio had already dodged a suit brought against them by the singer Helen Kane, who claimed Betty Boop was a "wrongful appropriation" of her identity. In fact, Boop had been designed after Kane (making Boop a sort of caricature manqué), but Kane lost the case when it was discovered Kane's trademark "Boop-oop-a-doop" hadn't been coined by Kane at all; in fact, she'd apparently lifted it from a black singer, named Baby Esther.
The byways of transformation, appropriation and outright theft, knotted along the miscegenating lines of entertainment and race -- the sputtering black soul hidden under the gloss of a painted cel or a turn of phrase -- leads us back to another memorable Fleischer rotoscope: Cab Calloway's first immigration into the Boop universe. In "Minnie the Moocher," when Boop visits a ghostly underworld, Calloway appears in the guise of a ghost walrus, singing "Minnie" through his ectoplasmic ivory tusks. At first this might seem like a bit of early ethnic smuggling (like the contraband phraseology "kick the gong," stashed in an entertainment for bright-eyes kids, most of whom, we have to assume, had yet to be acquainted with an opium-pipe). Up to the present day, there's a tendency to "clothe" ethnicity under unsewn animal skins: The Little Mermaid couldn't have a real Jamaican in it, so the faux-patois had to issue from a hermit crab. Likewise, Eddie Murphy has now ventriloquized both a dragon and a donkey.
But "Minnie the Moocher" isn't an attempt to "mask" the race of the performer since the cartoon actually begins with live footage of Calloway and his orchestra. The hilarious, slithery, ineffably cool dance moves that Calloway exhibits here are the same steps copied for the bump and shuffle of the ghost (Calloway, for the record, reportedly fell off his chair laughing when he first saw his Walrusification).
Calloway's transmigration to animal form may've been an active mercy, considering the caricatural imperatives of the time. Louis Armstrong wasn't so lucky; in the Boop cartoon "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You," Louis appears as an African "native." As the title song begins, a spear-wielding African's head balloons, 'til it engulfs his body and floats into the air: the song is mouthed by a thick-lipped top-knotted cannibal-dirigible. This eventually melts away to superimposed footage of Armstrong's actual head, mugging and rolling his eyes in echo of the cartoon.
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