The story of the Frenkel Brothers, Herschel (1902-1972), Salomon”Shlomo”, (1912-2001), and David (1914-1994), is not without tragedy. The Egyptian brothers had an amazing drive and devotion and dedication to the art of animation, in a nation without an animation industry and a time when American animation…mainly Disney’s…was more than enough.

So their dedication was unique. Animation was more than a career choice; it was a calling. The brothers had no predecessors and no mentors to guide them. All they could do was gain access to reels of American cartoons and make painstaking studies. They constructed their own camera stand courtesy of guesswork; technique and technology were acquired through trial and error. Plus a great deal of frustration. Likely there were no pencil tests; those were not yet common even in America. (A Fleischer had said that if an animator couldn’t bypass pencil tests, he was no animator.) The Frenkels faced uncertainty until the art was finished and photographed. Cels were painted and scrubbed; the brothers are known to have destroyed the negatives of reels they deemed inadequate.

The situation is different today; it doesn’t matter where anything is manufactured as long as the price is right. Animation can be farmed out to any country one can name and still be called “American”.The concept of local industry keeping citizens employed has crumbled.But in the 1930s, it was a source of pride for a nation to be able to point to a local and say “He is OUR Walt Disney.” Disney was the beaming light; his name was animation.Even if a studio was swiping the work of Fleischer or Van Beuren (a more popular source than one might think), “Disney” was the name that lent dignity and credibility to the enterprise.

Naturally, the Frenkels’ first enterprise was the goal of all enterprising animators of the early 1930s; to create a Mickey Mouse. Their first volley, a MARCO MONKEY (1936), no doubt suffered from the brothers’ lack of expertise, was poorly received and forgotten.

The creators turned to the world of human beings, their inspiration being the work of a minor New York studio, Van Beuren.

Van Beuren’s was almost the flip side of Disney’s; the cartoons were inexpensive and the art was loose and imprecise. But their output had a quirky sense of fun that made the cartoons unique. They had a worldliness and an unworldliness. The films ranged from odd to strange.

Van Beuren’s “star” characters of the early 30s were TOM AND JERRY, a breezypair of bachelors that preceded the cat-and-mouse frenemies. This series is said to have been more popular with the foreign market than stateside, and they were the favorite source of copyists. Van Beuren animation was traced over and pirated in Mexico as well as Egypt. Here’s a comparison reel compiled by Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation.

The Frenkels baldly spun the design of Van Beuren’s “Tom” into theirprojected new star. In place of the original’s dwarfed derby, thebrothers planted a fez on the head of MISH MISH EFFENDI to establish an uniquely Egyptian identity.

The brothers were fervently proud of and had deep love for their homeland and insistently incorporated Egyptian cultural elements to make their films stand apart. They would have been content to remain in Egypt for the rest of their lives…

Mish Mish was a hard sell. One financier’s negative response has beentranslated as “It’s no use” and “When pigs fly!” No doubtchuckling, the brothers used his succinct rejection, “MAFISH FAIDA”, as the title of their first entry in 1936.

The new character was not heroic. Mish Mish and his Bluto-like chum werestreet corner wolves, pursuing and invading the home of a Betty Boop clone. In an effort to impress her, Mish Mish performs a dance, animation traced from a skeleton in the Van Beuren cartoon WOT ANIGHT. His sidekick accompanies him on the harmonium, his fingering and facial features also pirated from WOT A NIGHT. The girl’s boxer boyfriend rides to the rescue in animation swiped from Van Beuren’s IN THE BAG, and sections of the American soundtracks are spliced in as well. The Frenkels’ films were filled with swipes; the Mish Mish that followed, NATIONAL DEFENSE, incorporated sound and tracings from the Van Beuren JOINT WIPERS, Ub Iwerks’ RAGTIME ROMEO and the Mickey Mouse YE OLDEN DAYS.

It’s likely no one noticed. Mish Mish was a hit from the first, playing encoresdemanded by audiences tickled to see their culture and physical surroundings represented by pen-and-ink characters. Mish Mish became such an emblem that the commission came for him to represent Egypt in NATIONAL DEFENSE (1940), an entertaining short making a plea to citizens for support of the war effort. It opens with a long pan over an Egyptian landscape and rhapsodic narration: this is the land to be protected. Mish Mish is a more responsible fellow now. He and Jenny are entertainers at a nightclub. Jenny performs a belly dance; a hookah grows a face and bob to the rhythm. In the audience are caricatures of Hollywood comedians to celebrate Egypt’s solidarity with the US, Laurel and Hardy and Eddie Cantor are caricatured in the audience. From a radio with a face, arms and legs comes an announcement of war. Mish Mish jumps on a table to encourage the nation’s people to unite and fight. In montages, citizens self sacrifice to contribute and Mish Mish swiftly downs enemy planes with push button weapons. As the film ends, Mish Mish and Jenny sit together, silently admiring the tranquil Egyptian horizon and exchanging looks of love.

No doubt the brothers supported their income with film advertisements and instructional films, but these would have been uncredited and now considered lost. Mish Mish returned to the screen periodically; one short promoting driving etiquette, another a sequence of him dancing for and with a live actress, much like Jerry the mouse danced with Gene Kelly.

Mish Mish had no formal character design; a wisp of a goatee appears and disappears in the earliest films, and his proportions go from “rubberhose” caricature to realistic when rotoscope action is used. His face was never consistent, 30s pie eyes in one scene, dashing movie hero the next within the same seven minutes.

The films are diverting but oddly unambitious. There are no trick shots and attempts to be cinematic are next to nonexistent. There was no possibility of their competing in the world market. The Frenkels enjoyed the prestige of beating tremendous odds to become the only game in town. The point of their films was to be charming and entertaining, which they certainly were.

Profits were less than adequate. Their failed ventures caused hardships and rancor within their family.

With Egypt diseased with anti Semitic rage after the war, the families fled to France.

Once arriving, the brothers essentially had to begin again. Mish Mish marched on in inexpensive cartoons produced for the home movie market, with a French beret and a name change to Mimiche His girlfriend, the Boop-like Jenny, the Frenkels had a fondness for, also returned in home movies and commercial spots. A single 1954 film, THE ATOMIC EXPERIENCE, was straight science fiction, with much of the animation plagiarized from the Fleischers’ first SUPERMAN entry.

The brothers did not get the same respect in France. They fell prey to charlatan financiers, and their great dreams of completing a feature, DREAMS OF THE BEAUTIFUL BLUE DANUBE, in the hopes of becoming true Walt Disneys, failed. The existing footage from BLUE DANUBE perfectly illustrates the brothers’ dilemma; they never advanced. The film was lyrical in intent, with images of a dreamy eyed Jenny floating in a canoe,waltzing with a Prince Charming, and observing the Rich and Beautiful. But even in 1964, the Rich and Beautiful were represented by illustrations of Art Deco mannequins looking straight from 1930s advertisements. The Frenkels tried almost desperately to win backers, writing passionate letters of self recommendation to heads of state. They even lied to their families, claiming that their financing for the feature came from a gambling win when in reality they were diverting funds meant to support the households.

The brothers were either blind to their own shortcomings or hoped that their determination would overcome them. Their films are charming and even inspiring today, and Mish Mish is still an icon in Egypt and has a certain “cult” cache in America, but the cartoons never rose to the Golden Age’s state of the art. Today the studio is a grand achievement of independent animation made by Men Who Dared.

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