Israeli Filmmaker Asaf Galay Wins $200K Documentary Prize For Fleischer Studios Documentary ‘Cartooning America’

The animation history documentary Cartooning America has won the sixth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. The director Asaf Galay will receive a $200,000 cash prize.

Since 2019, the award has been given annual to exemplary documentary films that tell compelling stories about American history. The annual prize for documentary is presented by the Library of Congress, The Better Angels Society, Ken Burns, and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation.

The multi-part Cartooning America is about Jewish immigrants Max and Dave Fleischer, whose New York-based Fleischer Studios produced Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman cartoons during the 1930s and ’40s, and innovated many animation techniques during the Golden Age of American animation.

Prior to Cartooning America, Israeli filmmaker Galay directed numerous documentaries for Israeli television, including a series on Israeli humor (In the Jewish Land, 2005) and a feature film on the Israeli poet Nathan Alterman (Sentimentality Allowed, 2012). He also wrote, directed, and produced a documentary on Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Muses of Bashevis Singer, 2015, and directed and produced The Hebrew Superhero (2016) on the subject of comics in Israeli history.

It is unclear where Cartooning America can be seen or how it has been released. According to a description of the film, the film “uses visuals including pencil tests, storyboards, drawings, behind-the-scenes home movies, and the Fleischer’s very autobiographical cartoons, alongside interviews with family members, historians, and the animators they inspired, to tell this family’s dramatic rags to riches to rags again story.” A funding proposal for the film is available online (download PDF).

In a statement on the award, Ken Burns said, “Cartooning America reminds me why I – like the Fleischer brothers – have pursued visual storytelling, and why this medium remains so vital and affecting.”

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden added, “Animation created some of the most iconic figures in American cinema. I am pleased to recognize, in first place, a documentary that so vividly portrays two early pioneers of the animation industry that has brought us so much laughter and joy.”

Hayden selected the winning film, in consultation with Burns. Galay will be awarded on September 17, 2024, at a ceremony with Hayden, Burns, and to-be-announced congressional speakers. Bank of America is the presenting sponsor for this year’s event. Additional sponsors are Peter and Lindsay Snell, Bain Capital, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Meredith DeWitt, Annabelle and Jackson Dunn, FTI Consulting, and Public Strategies Washington, Inc.

The runner-up, Norah Shapiro’s Magic & Monsters, will receive a $50,000 cash prize. The film recounts the dark history of the Minnesota Children’s Theatre Company, and how a group of former child actors are seeking justice and healing after its founder was convicted of child sexual abuse.

Four additional finalists will each receive a $25,000 cash prize.