Oskar Fischinger was a German artist and animator and is most known for his influential short films that he described as "visual music." Pairing classical scores with organic abstraction, Fischinger's experimental animations won accolades across Europe and they were often used in advertisements and shown in theaters before films. Fischinger fled to Los Angeles in 1933 and worked in Hollywood, even contributing to Disney's Fantasia in 1940, but he found the commercialism of the industry stifling. He returned to creating his own short films but they were expensive and time-intensive; in the 1950s, Fischinger shifted his focus to painting, bringing to the medium the same energy and spirit found in his animations.