Israeli director Asaf Galay’s “Cartooning America,” a documentary about the lives of animation pioneers Max and Dave Fleischer, has won the $200,000 first prize for documentary film, jointly awarded by the Library of Congress, Ken Burns, and the Lavine Family Foundation.

Galay’s past projects have been devoted to diverse subjects, including the writings of Saul Bellow and Issac B. Singer, as well as the history of Israeli cartoons.

Experts in the fields of popular culture, animation and cinema history were advisors for the making of the hour-long documentary.

Inventors, artists and composers Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, Jewish immigrants who endured the crime, poverty and disease of ghettos in Brownsville, Brooklyn and Manhattan, their own Broadway-based company, Fleischer Studios.  Assisted by a team of family members and employees, they created memorable cartoon characters including Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman, cultural icons that continue to be popular today. Galay’s film surveys the forces that shaped these characters, reflecting not only the brothers’ experiences, but those of their immigrant audiences, from the 1920s through World War II. Contemporary viewers can get their dose of Popeye, Ms. Boop and Superman through live action movies, television, the internet and soon, the musical stage.

Through its focus on the era in which the Fleischer brothers were active, “Cartooning America” offers fascinating insights into American society, Jewish life, cinema, and politics.

A New Look at Cartoons

Enjoyed by children and many adults, newspaper comics and the animated cartoons they spawned were considered vulgar and devoid of value; this negative viewpoint has been reassessed. Appearing in early 20th century periodicals, comics strips like “Mutt and Jeff,” a slapstick treatment of working-class life, as well as “Krazy Kat” and “Little Nemo,” surreal fables set in fantasy worlds, were direct sources for both the form and content of artistic masters including Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró.

Equally valuable is the way that cartoons, and pop culture in general, can reveal how people thought and felt in their own times. Cartoons of the 1930s and 40s, with the Fleischer Studios in the lead, incorporated violent and erotic imagery, crass slang and vernacular, all of which answered their viewers need to flaunt convention, break free and live authentically, desires often acted on by Jazz Age writers, performers and artists. Scored to jazz and ragtime, the Fleischer cartoons sometimes spotlighted songs like “Minnie the Moocher” (about cocaine addiction) or “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” sung by Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. The songs’ irreverent lyrics and pulsating, brassy orchestrations perfectly match the cartoons’ zany sensibility.

According to “Cartooning America,” Dave and Max Fleischer recast their own world in animated form. Making her debut in 1930 was the flapper Betty Boop, initially voiced by Jewish actress Mae Questel. Simultaneously demure and sensuous, her appearance and persona were modeled on movie star Clara Bow and singer Fanny Brice. Peppered with Yiddish dialogue, the cartoons portray Betty’s catastrophic misadventures on the Lower East Side, recognized by its tenements, pushcarts, and Yiddish signage. Eternally harassed, as was true for real life women, the singing and dancing Betty always emerges unscathed, albeit with her little black dress in tatters. Opening on Broadway in 2025, “Boop: The Musical” will transfer the winsome heroine from her black and white locale to one cast in strident color.

Although it’s impossible (and just silly) to delineate the ethnic heritage of Popeye, his girl Olive, and his nemesis Bluto, there is no doubt that the rough and tumble brutality of crime-ridden New York slums informs the environment in which the trio inhabit. One or two of the early Popeye cartoons address themes of powerlessness, persecution and exclusion. Making his first appearance in a 1929 comic, the spinach loving sailor, who endured bullets and beatings without being killed or injured, was first seen onscreen in 1934, and surpassed Mickey Mouse in popularity.

Still alive in the American consciousness is Superman, whose history and significance would take another million or so words, with more left to tell.

Film historian Mark Langer has described the early Fleischer Studios, and the melting pot culture epitomized by the brothers and their immigrant staff, as the collective glue which generated an animated, but familiar world with which they identified, as did their fans: “They are the products of urban America, depicting not only Jews and a Jewish viewpoint, but a multi-vocal view of America.”

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Cheryl Kempler is an art and music specialist who works in the B’nai B’rith International Curatorial Office and writes about history and Jewish culture for B’nai B’rith Magazine. To view some of her additional content, click here.