Undertaken in collaboration with the Seth MacFarlane Foundation and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, this restoration unearths lost classics from animation’s Golden Age.

Back From the Ink, the first ever curated restoration of historically significant animated shorts from the 1920s to 1940s, is a profound work of cinema preservation from an unlikely union: the showrunner of Family Guy and one of the US’s greatest living directors. It includes a 1944 stop-motion ‘Puppetoon’ from George Pál, a 1939 Terrytoon directed by Mannie Davis, and seven short films, drawn from 1928 to 1939, by the Fleischer Brothers (creators of Betty Boop and Koko the Clown), which feature jazz-age collaborations with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. The nine animations were selected and restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with Paramount Pictures Archives and with funding from MacFarlane.

Films in this package: Koko’s Tattoo (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1928), Little Nobody (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1935), The Little Stranger (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1936), Greedy Humpty Dumpty (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1936), Peeping Penguins (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1937), The Fresh Vegetable Mystery (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1939), So Does An Automobile (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1939), The Three Bears (dir. Mannie Davis, 1939) and Two-Gun Rusty (dir. George Pál, 1944).

“What an astonishing experience, to see these remarkable pictures … brought back to their full glory … The films now seem as fresh as they did when they were newly made.” – Martin Scorsese

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Restored animated shorts courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation.

Restoration funding provided by the Seth MacFarlane Foundation.