Koko's Earth Control (1928)
Koko the Clown and his dog Fitz wander into a control room lined with levers governing the Earth itself; when Fitz pulls one out of curiosity, gravity, weather, and the ordinary rules of the world spin into chaos.
Koko’s Earth Control came from Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell studio, built on their signature rotoscoping technique that blended fluidly hand-drawn characters with live-action backgrounds, and was added to the National Film Registry in 2024.
Background
Koko’s Earth Control came from Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell studio, built around their signature technique of rotoscoping, tracing over live-action footage frame by frame, which gave their hand-drawn clown character Koko an unusually fluid range of movement for the period. In this short, Koko and his dog Fitz wander into a control room where levers govern the fundamental workings of the Earth itself, and disaster follows when Fitz pulls one out of simple curiosity.
What to watch for
Watch for how the film blends Koko’s animated world with live-action footage of the studio and its animators, a hallmark of the Out of the Inkwell series that distinguished it from most other animation studios of the silent era, which relied on purely drawn worlds. The short’s playful premise, that the ordinary rules of weather and gravity are controlled by hidden machinery, gives it a surreal quality typical of much 1920s animation before more structured, story-driven cartoons became the norm. It was added to the National Film Registry in 2024.
