--- title: Google Honors Oskar Fischinger With Interactive Doodle description: Google marks the birthday of German-American artist Oskar Fischinger with an interactive Doodle letting users create their own masterpieces canonical: https://time.com/4827886/google-doodle-oskar-fischinger-animation/ author: Ryan Kilpatrick article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-06-22T05:51:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:05:56.222Z og:title: Google Honors Oskar Fischinger With Interactive Doodle og:description: Users can create their own audio-visual masterpieces og:url: https://time.com/4827886/google-doodle-oskar-fischinger-animation/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6917012807745b4b/6988d2ce0b72e3ef996ee59b/e89ea2e5b995e5bfabe785a7-2017-06-22-e4b88ae58d889-26-59.png?branch=production&width=533&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 533 og:image:height: 300 og:image:alt: Oskar Fischinger Google Doodle og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Honors Oskar Fischinger With Interactive Doodle twitter:description: Users can create their own audio-visual masterpieces twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6917012807745b4b/6988d2ce0b72e3ef996ee59b/e89ea2e5b995e5bfabe785a7-2017-06-22-e4b88ae58d889-26-59.png?branch=production&width=533&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Honors Animator Oskar Fischinger With This Amazing Interactive Doodle > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=dbaaa785-9589-40c9-a301-215214ee2264&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Ryan Kilpatrick](https://time.com/author/ryan-kilpatrick/) ## Ryan Kilpatrick Jun 22, 2017 5:51 AM UTC  Oskar Fischinger Google Doodle. Oskar Fischinger Google Doodle. Google by [Ryan Kilpatrick](https://time.com/author/ryan-kilpatrick/) ## Ryan Kilpatrick Jun 22, 2017 5:51 AM UTC Google is marking what would be the 117th birthday of German-American artist Oskar Fischinger with an interactive new [Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday) that lets users create their own audio-visual masterpieces in the abstract animator’s distinctive style. Fischinger fled Hitler’s Germany for the U.S. in 1936, when many artists and intellectuals — labeled as degenerates by the Nazi Party — fled amid the regime’s crackdown on cultural modernism. And he was among the modernest of modernists. Fischinger was a trailblazing animator and painter, producing abstract film graphics decades before the advent of digital post-production. From his new office at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, Fischinger produced [entrancing animations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=they7m6YePo) synched to popular and classical music, and he contributed fantastical sequences to Walt Disney’s _Fantasia_ and _Pinocchio_. Long before the age of computer-generated graphics and animation software, Fischinger’s short films were frame-by-frame, stop-animation labors of love that could take months or even years to complete. Leon Hong, the creative lead for the new interactive Doodle, hopes that it “inspires you to seek out the magic of Fischinger for yourself.” The visionary émigré passed away in Los Angeles in 1967, aged 66. \[[Google](https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday)\] ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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