June 22 is the birthday of German animation pioneer OSKAR FISCHINGER (1900-1967).

After years of ground-breaking work in Germany, Fischinger moved to Hollywood, after the Nazis instituted their policies against “degenerate art,” which included abstract work like Fischinger’s animation. Some of Fischinger’s achievements in Hollywood included the Bach Toccata and Fugue sequence in Disney’s Fantasia, the invention of the Lumigraph, an instrument that produced images by pressing against a rubberized screen so it could protrude into a narrow beam of colored light, and this film, An Optical Poem (1938), set to Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

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