An Out-of-the-Inkwell Origin Tale

The Ouija Board (1920)
Starring: Max Fleischer and Anonymous Fleischer Studio Employees

Director: Max Fleischer

Rating: Six of Ten Stars

While studio staff members play with a Quija Board, the Animator (Fleischer) draws a haunted house from which the ghostly inhabitants emerge and strike fear in the heart of KoKo the Clown.

 "The Ouija Board" is an early entry in the Out of the Inkwell, a series that merged animation and live-action footage to create situations where our world and the cartoonworld collided in more or less surreal (but always chaotic) ways. Fleischer and his team were clearly still finding their footing with the technology, as the interaction between the animated characters and the live-action footage is minimal, and the rotoscoping of an actor (Dave Fleischer, most likely) that forms the foundation for Koko is more obvious and hamfisted than in future installments.

Although this is by no means the best of the Out of the Inkwell series, it's still lots of fun. The variety of ghosts that emerge from the haunted house have got to be the most diverse group of spooks to ever appear together in a single animated film. Despite Koko's terror and aggression toward them, they are also among the nicest--they even cook him breakfast at one point.

I also found this to be a fun installment in the series because it triggered a thought in my head that may or may not have been the intention of the creators: This was the first time that Koko left his two-dimensional world and entered the three-dimensional one... and it was triggered by the magic (or the curse) of the Ouiji Board the staff members were playing with. This may not have been the first in the series by release date, but in my personal Koko Canon, it's the first time the Animator and his staff encountered living cartoon characters. (Watch their surprise when they spot Koko... and compare it to later episodes where it's commonplace for him to run wild in the studio.)

Maybe someday, I'll do a post with a "suggested viewing order" to tell the complete, epic tale of Koko and the Animator. After all, the entire world is destroyed in one of them, so now I have a beginning and end to the saga.

The overall weakness of "The Ouija Board" can be taken as perhaps the clearest example of my repeated assertions that Walt Disney's Alice in Cartoonland (aka The Alice Comedies) series is an inferior and borderline inept attempt at capturing the magic Fleischer created in Out of the Inkwell. I encourage you to watch the cartoon embedded below, and then click on the link in this paragraph and pick any of the Alice cartoons you'll find there. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who agrees or disagrees with my assessment.