I love the history of film and have watched thousands of early--very early films. Among them have been quite a few animated films, so I have a good idea about what types of animated films were available back in 1920...and they were incredibly primitive. Most had very simple drawings and backgrounds and just a few years later, these simple sorts of cartoons simply wouldn't have made it in theaters. A wonderful exception to these simplistic cartoons were the Koko films of Max Fleischer.
Before Fleischer started his own studio, he worked for Bray Studios. There, he perfected the use of the Rotoscope...a technique he invented by which a cartoonist would take live action film footage and trace over it to create animated characters. The biggest advantage with this sort of technique is that the characters were extremely fluid and moved about like real people or animals. "The Ouija Board" is one of these Rotoscoped films and uses Fleischer's first star, Koko the Clown. Like most of these Koko films, he is a character that can interact with the real world--much like you saw in later films like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?".
The plot for this short is very simple and the cartoon lasts less than six minutes. One of the animators and a janitor are playing with a Ouija Board and as for Koko, he's haunted by a bunch of ghosts until he ultimately leaves the cartoon and starts trying to scare the folks in the studio.
For the most part, all of this this is good clean fun. There are a few stereotypes, common in the day, involving the black janitor and ghosts---certainly not politically correct nor all that funny. Though, Fleischer, too, reacts to the 'ghost' and so it's not all at the expense of the poor black man....so who knows if viewers today will be offended by it or not! Regardless, the animation is lovely and the film holds up pretty well today.
By the way, if you are curious about who it was that dressed up like Koko and let themselves be animated for these 'Out of the Inkwell' films...it was Dave, Max's brother.
