[Commlist] Seeking 4th Panelist for SCMS 2024 - "Enfleshment in the Fleischer Studios"

The panel “*/Enfleshment in the Fleischer Studios: Rendering Race and 
Animating the Other/*” is seeking a fourth panelist for SCMS 2024 in 
Boston. Please see further details in the CfP below.

If you are interested in being a part of this panel or have any 
questions for clarification, please reach out at gentryb 
[at]umich[dot]edu. Panelist proposals will not be considered after 
August 28. **

With gratitude and best wishes,

Briand (Brinni) Gentry

she/her
Doctoral Candidate
Universtiy of Michigan – Film, Television, & Media

gentryb [at]umich[dot]edu

Panel CfP:

*/“Enfleshment in the Fleischer Studios: Rendering Race and Animating 
the Other/*,” aims to curate a broad range of media historians, 
theorists, and animation specialists to consider the role that race and 
otherness play in making Fleischer Studios animations “work.”

In 1934, Fleischer Studios released a short film, /Betty Boop’s Rise to 
Fame/, combining live-action footage of Max Fleischer and a reporter 
with animations of Betty Boop moving around their office to perform a 
revue of her song and dance numbers from her greatest hits: /Stopping 
the Show /(1932), /Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle/ (1932), and /The Old Man of 
the Mountain/ (1933). In this nearly 9 minute short Boop herself 
imitates Fanny Brice, performs her “I’m an Indian” in a sensualized 
buckskin and papoose costume, crossdresses as she vocally mimics Maurice 
Chevailler, rubs herself with ink from an inkwell to enter brownface as 
she performs a Rotoscoped hula lifted from the performance of The Royal 
Samoan’s lead dancer, Lotamuru, and finally proceeds to rid herself of 
the ink-staining of her dermis so she can play the white damsel foil to 
the lecherous Old Man of the Mountain (who is, significantly, voiced by 
Cab Calloway). This short serves to condense a much larger pattern 
within the Fleischer Studios where in ethnic and racialized talent were 
incorporated into Boop’s sounds, somatics, and stylizations with full 
acknowledgement of the original source material. In part to demonstrate 
the prowess of the Fleischer developed Rotoscope, many Fleischer 
animations (especially those of Betty Boop) open with live-action clip 
featuring the labor that was Rotoscoped into Boop’s own vocalizations 
and movements. Betty Boop herself was conceived as a quintessential 
caricature of a Jazz Age flapper and, like many of the flapper icons 
before her, racial appropriation and a certain play with fluidity (both 
gendered and racialized) are the keys to her success as a continual 
novelty. Like many flapper icons before her, Boop’s identity was 
constantly in question – was she Black, Jewish, White? Was her 
countenance lifted from Helen Kane, Baby Esther, or Josephine Baker? Why 
is boop’s fluidly fashioned flesh such a factor in her appeal? As Anne 
Anlin Cheng has stated, with regard to the Modernist fascination with 
Josephine Baker’s constantly visible skin, “Baker’s 
performances…challeng[ed] us to confront the ongoing dilemma of how to 
see raced bodies at the intersection of historic materiality and early 
century semiotics” (/Second Skin/, 175).

This panel seeks to examine the ways in which racial and ethnic 
distinction, ambivalence, and fluidity are utilized in the full revue of 
Fleischer Studios characters and shorts from */Betty Boop, Popeye/, and 
/Koko the Clown/ to the /Color Classics/ Series, /Talkartoons/, and /Out 
of the Inkwell/ shorts. *This panel will serve as a collected rumination 
on the variety of ways a single animation studio makes use of 
animation’s affordances in ways that illuminate how the coding of voice, 
movement, and epidermal tinting operate to reveal the role that 
fantasies of racial fluidity and masquerade serve in trying to pin down 
race as something finite, durable, and legibly /Other/. By focusing on a 
studio like Fleischer (1929-1942) which operated from the gradual 
decline of silent cinema, through pre-code entertainments, and 
essentially shuttered its doors during its consolidation with the studio 
system and Paramount, this panel will offer a start at a thorough 
investigation of how animation practices, labor, and the particular 
invention of the Rotoscope all functioned to leverage racial fluidity as 
a hallmark of the studio that once competed with Disney. As Nicholas 
Sammond has meaningfully underscored, the history of animation 
(particularly US animation) is intimately entwined with minstrelsy. What 
do we make of a studio that acknowledges its appropriations as much as 
it intensifies and deflects them? What can we come to understand about 
the role fantasies of racial fluidity and fixity played and continue to 
play in the US mediascape by examining how an animation studio like 
Fleischer relied on the labor, creativity, and aestheticizations of 
groups considered Other to secure its spot in the mainstream? Why is 
animation fixated on epidermal inscription? How is race rendered by 
animation’s technologies? How is objecthood defied or reified in animation?

Approaches to this topic and research angles might include, but need not 
be limited too:

-Animation technologies

-Animation history

-Examinations of the various ways in which raced labor was featured and 
Rotoscoped in Fleischer animations

-Gender/sexuality

-Music/Musicology/Music History

-Racialized/Ethnicized Performance Theory

-Racialized/Ethniczed Performance History (ie theories and histories 
surrounding US minstrelsy, yellowface performance, and various other 
modes of racial masquerade)

-Jewish performance history

-Objecthood

-Kitsch theory

-Aesthetics of epidermalization

Please send a brief topic proposal, title, and 3-5 bibliographic sources 
to gentryb [at]umich[dot]edu. If your paper is selected you should know 
within 24 hours of sending your email to me. Should your paper be 
selected, I request that you get a 2500 character abstract to me along 
with a brief author bio by no later than August 29.


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