In 1933, at age 20, he went to work for Fleischer Studios as an errand boy, where his talent as a draftsman and his ambitions advanced him to the position of an animator within one year. During the late 1930s he worked on a number of studio shorts, and when the studio moved to Miami in 1938 he went with it. There, in addition to the shorts, he worked on both of the studio's feature-length films, "Gulliver's Travels" and "Mr. Bug Goes to Town", as well as the two-reel "Raggedy Ann & Raggedy Andy". Paramount took over the Fleischer studio in 1942 and reestablished it in New York as Famous Studios. Joe Oriolo met Otto Messmer (who was employed with the studio as a storyboard artist from 1944–46) before leaving in 1944.