He created special effects for Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket films, and influenced Disney's Fantasia.
Born in Gelnhausen, near Frankfurt, Fischinger apprenticed at an organ-building firm after he finished school until the owners were drafted into World War I.
At this time, Fischinger was experimenting with colored liquids and three-dimensional modelling materials such as wax and clay.
Moving to Munich, Fischinger licensed the wax slicing machine to Ruttmann, who used it to make some backgrounds for Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an animated fairy tale film, making the moving backgrounds and magic scenes.
In 1924, Fischinger formed a company with American entrepreneur Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences.
Finally, in an effort to escape bill collectors, Fischinger decided to surreptitiously depart Munich for Berlin in June 1927.
[4] In 1928, he was hired to work on the feature film Woman in the Moon (German: Frau im Mond), directed by Fritz Lang, which provided him a steady salary for a time.
[5] An agent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screened prints of Komposition in Blau and Muratti in a small art theatre in Hollywood, and Ernst Lubitsch was impressed by the films and the audience's enthusiastic response to the shorts.
Upon arriving in Hollywood in February 1936, Fischinger was given an office at Paramount Studios, German-speaking secretaries, an English tutor, and a weekly salary of $250.
Several years later, with the help of Hilla von Rebay and a grant from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later The Guggenheim), he was able to buy the film back from Paramount.
According to Moritz, Fischinger composed An Optical Poem (1937) to Franz Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody for MGM, but received no profits due to studio bookkeeping systems.
According to William Moritz, Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand in Pinocchio (1940).
1 (1947) as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke—and the multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization.
[8] In the late 1940s Fischinger invented the Lumigraph (patented in 1955) which some have mistakenly called a type of color organ.
The instrument produced imagery by pressing against a rubberized screen so it could protrude into a narrow beam of colored light.
Two people were required to operate the Lumigraph: one to manipulate the screen to create imagery, and a second to change the colors of the lights on cue.
After his death, his widow Elfriede and daughter Barbara gave performances with the Lumigraph, along with William Moritz, in Europe and the US.