Hans Fischerkoesen's Gift to Today's Cinema

The Gifts of Hans Fischerkoesen

Hans Fischerkoesen’s short films, despite being made from a dark time and place as World War II Germany, were very uplifting and warmhearted. They were not very different from the American cartoons, such as Disney or Fleischer, when it came to plot or style. One may think the German animator had a very philanthropic point of view based on the humanity he gave his characters, even when their situations were bad. Few of Fischerkoesen’s shorts, including commercials for company products, involved stories with conflict, but for the most part, it just showed characters having a good time. Sometimes, his animations did not even have to have a plot. It would be enjoyable just to watch how his drawings would act and react.

If there were a commonality in Fischerkoesen’s animations, it would mostly be their symbolisms of nature. Cartoons like “Der Schneemann” (The Snowman) and “Die Verwitterte Melodie” (Weather-Beaten Melody) similarly take place in a quiet countryside or meadow, rather than a bustling city, where flowers and animals are abundant. Humans are rarely around, and character roles are instead taken over by anthropomorphized animals and insects, or personified objects (like trees or snowmen). Sometimes these characters are metaphors of nature, like the star maids, cloud servants, and the Sun Queen in Fischerkoesen’s advertisement for Philips’ light bulbs. That was where Fischerkoesen showed his talent for character design.

A common activity of Fischerkoesen’s characters is to dance to music. Whether the music being played was pleasant ragtime or classical orchestral pieces, the protagonists seem to have a weakness to move to a beat, and sometimes use dancing to interact with their friends that appear along the way. In “Weather-Beaten Melody,” an abandoned record player seems to bring every insect in the vicinity together and happily move to the tune. In “The Snowman,” the titular character enjoys ice-skating on a frozen lake for a good amount of time. Even in the smoking advertisement “Schall und Rauch,” (Smoke and Mirrors), Hans animates the smoke into graceful ballerina figures that glide through the smoke circles from the man’s cigar. Another smoking commercial has a cigarette dancing to the music of the Blue Danube.

Whenever Fischerkoesen had a plot in his cartoon, the main characters were a necessary part of bringing entertainment not only to the audience, but to the other characters as well. The protagonists are always kind, yet curious. They have an adventurous, fun-loving personality, urging them to discover and interact with new things, which may have good or bad consequences. The minor characters (if there are any) do not quite have the same values, and may even scorn the major characters for being different. If not, they will celebrate for discovering something new, safe and fun. In “Melody,” a bee finds an abandoned music player and uses her stinger to play a happy song. Soon after, every bug hears it and comes down to dance with the bee, because she was curious enough to try something new. In “Das Dumme Gaslein,” (Silly Gosling) however, the major character gets a different reaction. The goose is fascinated with the city life-style, which afterwards has an effect on her personality. She likes to strut, dress in fancy clothes made from spider webs and hay, and prefers not to bond with a mate. The other farm animals find her exotic behavior disturbing and disrupting the peace of the farm (although she did take advantage of the farm to build up her clothing). Her strange point of view is not welcome among the barnyard community. In “Snowman,” the curiosity of the snowman only affects his own outcome, rather than his choices being judged by anybody else. After performing pranks and antics in the snows of winter, he wishes he could walk around the flowers of July. He places himself in an icebox until summer comes, and then fulfills his dream, only to melt away minutes later.

Fischerkoesen also shows good use of technology in his shorts. He uses all kinds of tools that helped show depth, dimension and angularity. In “Melody,” the multiplane camera is used not only to show depth going left and right, but also forward and back. The camera combined with rotoscoping successfully created the illusion of the protagonist bee flying around the entire record player. Even with backgrounds that looked like drawings, the camera manages at one point to show a transition from a forward shot to a vertical shot, showing the sky, convincingly making it look like the viewer is lifting his head to look up. In “Snowman,” the very first establishing shot is a zoom-in on a live, miniature background, after which hand-drawn cels are used to place the characters on these backdrops. There is also a scene where the snowman finds a house and wants to go inside it. He walks around the fence, but while he does so, the camera spins around the three-dimensional house until the snowman reaches the gate. It is amazing to see how Fischerkoesen created believable depth without the use of modern-day computer-generated imagery.

There is one short that seems to show a darker side of Fischerkoesen than his friendly-looking cartoons. One of his advertisements for an alcoholic beverage, “Durch Nacht zum Licht,” (Through the Night to the Light) has a very nightmare-like style. A sleeping woman has dark, scary visions of rats, ghosts, demons, being chased by skeletons, and even falling from great heights. When she wakes up, the only appropriate remedy seems to be Underberg bitter. It is surprising to see that this was even allowed to be shown as a commercial, because it seems more like a deleted scene from Rosemary’s Baby. It was one of the few times Hans used what looked like stop-motion animation in his work, mostly when the skeleton was chasing the woman. It was also one of Hans’ works where he used live action reference (for the woman). Stop-motion can be used to make real life objects move very creepily, like a Tim Burton animation, especially if the animation is not smooth enough.

If there were anything to criticize about Fischerkoesen’s animations, it would be the morality in the stories he gave his cartoons, especially in “Gosling,” and “The Snowman.” The protagonists are similar to “fish-out-of-water,” characters because they have a point of view that goes against what nature intended or what others think. In “Gosling,” the goose grows up with a different personality than her brothers and sisters. Only after a fox cunningly lures the goose away from the farm to eat her do the other animals rescue her, and then she gives up her eccentric lifestyle to be safe and have the same personality as everybody else. In the end, she even admonishes one of her own children for walking differently. The lesson is that if your strange or different, then that is to be frowned upon. In “Snowman,” the protagonist dreams of experiencing the season of summer. After preserving himself in a household freezer, he emerges out into the beautiful, flower-filled meadows of July, only to melt under the hot sun. He sings happily as he is melting, but in a way, he is dying because of his actions. Unless it was a “curiosity killed the cat” moral, I don’t think it would satisfy audiences today. Basically, these stories are telling people that it is not okay to be yourself, and that following your dreams may have consequences. That would not mix well with modern-day morals in storytelling.

Other than that, Fischerkoesen’s animation uses bright colors and warm, public-spirited characters to convey a pleasant story. Not even the despair Nazi Germany brought to the world could bring his creative genius down. Sometimes he tried new styles and genres in his work, but for the most part they are musical, nature-related tales of enjoyable creatures and their experiences with what life has to offer. He used a variety of state-of–the-art technology (at the time) to give believability to his cartoons, and it always worked. He could have put more thought into his moral values when he put stories into his shorts, but these cartoons still hold up as evidence that Fischerkoesen was a great contributor to the world of animated shorts.