“Gulliver’s Travels” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film sereies Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
Nobody remembers who came in second.
Perhaps that explains why just about everyone but animation historians have forgotten Gulliver’s Travels. Released by the Fleischer Animation Studio in 1939, it was only the world’s second feature-length animated film.
The Fleischer brothers – Dave and Max – got their start in animation in the 1920s. From their New York studio they launched two fantastically popular series.
Max Fleischer and Betty Boop
Betty Boop was a prototypical flapper of the era, a big-headed beauty with a svelt body who was subversively aware of her sex symbol status.
Popeye, on the other hand, was a brawling, mumbling sailor who found superhuman strength in chugging canned spinach.
Both series were solid moneymakers.
But the financial and artistic success of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 convinced the brass at Paramount – which financed the Fleischers – that they needed their own feature animated film.
Prodded into action, the brothers announced that they would adapt Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It was Max Fleischer’s favorite book from boyhood.
What with its story of the shipwrecked Gulliver being held captive by a society of combative tiny people, there were all sorts of visual possibilities. (The novel’s second half finds Gulliver in a land of giants – but that part of the yarn was dropped.)
Butler's Cinema Scene 