The Reunion

Cartoonist Max Fleischer draws Koko the Clown who is hosting a reunion with his clown family. Max and another man are trying to capture the chaos in a photo. It's chaos for chaos' sake. There isn't much of a story. What they should have done is continuously add more and more characters into the scene until they start overflowing out of the room.

One of the pleasures of the Out of the Inkwell series of Koko pictures is, besides their technical excellence -- Max Fleischer invented rotoscoping and modeled Koko on his brother David, who later came to direct the series -- is an attention to detail that a lot of Fleischer's contemporary's ignored. Fleischer, like Messmer doing Felix at Sullivan's studio, realized that this was a cartoon universe and if he did not perfect the Cartoon Laws of Physics, he and Messmer laid the foundations for them.

In this one we see Max helping Koko prepare for a family reunion. When they get together -- inside the camera, of course --- it turns out to be a family of clowns. As usual, delightful.