From The Companion Series
Fleischer Studios entered my work long before MINIMA existed—first as a visual obsession, then as a method. Reading Donald Crafton’s history of early animation studios, with their peg bars, exposure sheets, and in-between drawings moving through a collective pipeline (Crafton 1982), I suddenly recognized something I had been trying to build in the Artefaktenatelier: an ethnographic studio that works like an animation floor. Leonard Maltin’s account of American cartoon houses, with their production routines and recurring characters (Maltin 1980), helped me see my own field materials—notes, fragments, objects—as frames in a sequence rather than isolated artefacts.
From Esther Leslie, I borrowed a different lesson. In Hollywood Flatlands, she shows how the “animation of commodities” reveals a modern world where things and figures share the same unstable ontology (Leslie 2002). Lampposts, pavements, and trash cans that come alive in Fleischer shorts were not far from the infrastructures, residues, and more-than-human companions that already populated my urban work. That connection folded back into Studio Ethnography: squash-and-stretch became a way to think about pressures on bodies and devices; loops echoed everyday circuits of delivery and cleaning; model sheets quietly resonated with my taxonomies of fragments and specimens, first explored in Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements and later in Tin Ethnography.
MINIMA is where these influences condense. Its Fleischer-style mascot, rubber-hose limbs, and one-ink risograph look are not decorative; they materialize the studio’s questions in pocket form. Each 16-panel issue acts like a tiny animation floor: characters recur like model sheets, hacks unfold like storyboards, and the city’s devices—turnstiles, planters, cables—enter the cast as co-workers. Fleischer Studies names this trajectory: from the Artefaktenatelier to the ethnographic studio, and from there into MINIMA, under the flicker of cartoon physics.
Hands-on exercise: The Animation Floor
Watch a short 1930s Fleischer cartoon with the sound off. While it plays, sketch a simple “studio map” of your current project: what are your model sheets (recurring figures or motifs)? What are the in-betweens (small transitions you overlook)? Where is the peg bar—the element that keeps everything registered as it moves? Afterwards, lay out your field materials on a table following that map and ask: what would this project look like if I treated it as an animation pipeline rather than a linear narrative?
References
- Crafton, Donald. 1982. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Leslie, Esther. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso.
- Maltin, Leonard. 1980. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Orrego, Santiago. 2023. Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements. Berlin: Self-published.