Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

The technique was invented by Max Fleischer, who used it in his series Out of the Inkwell starting around 1915, with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown. Max patented the method in 1917.

Fleischer used rotoscoping in a number of his later cartoons, most notably the Cab Calloway dance routines in three Betty Boop cartoons from the early 1930s, and the animation of Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels (1939). The Fleischer studio's most effective use of rotoscoping was in their series of action-oriented Superman cartoons, in which Superman and the other animated figures displayed very realistic movement.

Max Fleischer (July 19, 1883 – September 11, 1972) was an American animator. He was a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations.

Born to a Jewish family in Kraków, Poland, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian province of Galicia, Max Fleischer was the second oldest of six children of an Austrian immigrant tailor, William Fleischer. His family emigrated to the USA in 1887 and settled in New York City, where he attended public school; he spent his formative years in Brownsville and Brooklyn. He attended Evening High School, received commercial art training at Cooper Union, and also attended The Mechanics and Tradesman's School. While still in his teens, he worked for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle as an errand boy, and eventually became a cartoonist. It was during this period he met newspaper cartoonist and early animator, John Randolph Bray. He married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel (Essie) Gold on December 25, 1905. Shortly afterward he accepted an illustrator's job for a catalog company in Boston. He returned to New York as Art Editor for Popular Science magazine around 1912; he also wrote books, including one called Noah's Shoes.