Before Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks hit the jackpot with Mickey Mouse, there was a cartoon star popular around the world: Felix The Cat.
The Cartoon Research website posted an informative and splendid piece about Felix two days ago. Universal Pictures has dubbed today Felix The Cat Day.
Thanks to the British Pathé Collection, quite a few excellent silent Felix cartoons can be seen on YouTube in good pictorial quality (note: for licensing inquiries, go to the British Pathé website).
Created by Otto Messmer (1892-1983) for the Pat Sullivan Studio, Felix The Cat was the most internationally popular of cartoon stars. Producer Pat Sullivan was a ferocious marketer who promoted the living daylights out of the resourceful black cat with the magic bag of tricks; in this sense, Sullivan predated and paved the way for Disney's merchandising of Mickey Mouse.
Mr. Messmer, whose concepts and designs were both minimalist and dreamlike, remains one of the all-time animation greats. So are two of the pioneering animators who worked on the series at Sullivan's New York studio, Bill Nolan and Raoul Barré.
By most accounts, the first Felix The Cat cartoon, Feline Follies, was released 100 years ago today, on November 9th, 1919.
Others suggest that Feline Follies was released to theatres earlier, in August of 1919, but we'll go with this date, as November 9 - also the birthday of comedy greats Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler and Ed Wynn - is being celebrated as the Felix centenary.
Otto Messmer began his career in 1912 drawing comics for local newspapers in 1912, but eventually. . . he would sacrifice his art and go in the movies!
Felix' intergalactic animated adventures remain funny, imaginative and highly original nearly a century later. The visual philosophy can be perspective and atmosphere-bending, and is closer to the sensibility of the Fleischer Studio's Out Of The Inkwell than to Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables.
Cranking out cartoons almost as blindingly fast as Paul Terry's studio produced Terrytoons, Messmer would make some of the greatest short films of the silent era.
The indefatigable Felix soon would go paw-to-toe with box office champion Charlie Chaplin and surpass the other cartoon characters of the era as a hit with movie audiences.
Competing cartoon producer Walt Disney, in his live-action + animation Alice In Cartoonland series, actually had a continuing feline character named Julius who looked somewhere between Felix and the cats who were bedeviled by Mickey Rats in Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables cartoons of the 1920's.
Felix could delve into futuristic science fiction by shrinking to the size of a molecule.
Felix traveled around the world in a lot less then 80 days in his many adventures.
One would assume Pat Sullivan was unimpressed by the jaunty rapscallion with a "Mickey Rat" quality that starred in the Walt Disney Comic Plane Crazy (produced as a silent, then later dubbed with a music track and sound effects). He and other producers of animation not named Walt Disney very likely got caught by surprise by the devil-may-care rodent's first sound cartoon.
Steamboat Willie, released theatrically on November 18, 1928, both featured a somewhat more refined version of Mickey Mouse and changed the game with its advanced concept of mixing sound and image, not just slapping a music track on a silent.
Pat Sullivan at first refused to convert to sound production, as did much of the industry, but eventually made Felix cartoons with music and sound effects.
The Felix cartoons with soundtracks from the 1929-1930 season remain fun and creative, much as Messmer's remarkable silents were, but it seems that the music tracks were essentially tacked on as an afterthought. Although Messmer continued making very enjoyable cartoons after sound became the rage, since Disney's latest cartoons had synchronized sound and, most importantly, incorporated the music into the animation, the Felix The Cat series soon, as inventive as they were, became something of an anachronism.
By the time progress had been made to adapt Felix to the world of synchronized sound, music and sound effects, as far as the character's popularity was concerned, the ship had sailed.
Still, even at the end of the run, there were individual cartoons such as Felix Woos Whoopee that were as wonderful and full of unfettered imagination as any in the series.
Otto Messmer only got credit for his amazing work in animation many decades after Felix' heydey as an international star, as booked in grand movie palaces around the world as Rudolf Valentino. Here's a clip from Jane Canemaker's interview with the legendary animator in his documentary Otto Messmer & Felix The Cat.
After the end of the animated series, Messmer drew Felix The Cat comics. The series lasted for 31 years. These comics have been compiled into a book which is gorgeous, but, alas, now out-of-print and, buyer beware, it can vary in price.
It isn't possible to keep a good magic cat down, so a few years after the 1930 season of Jacques Kopstein/Copley Pictures entries that concluded Otto Messmer's Felix series, the Van Beuren Studio, former specialists in primitive, bizarre, grotesque, rather weirdly funny (and frequently in bad taste) animated cartoons, bought the rights to Felix The Cat.
The Van Beuren studio opted to change course and get Disney-fied by hiring former Walt Disney Studio animation director Burt Gillett to make Rainbow Parade cartoons.
The Rainbow Parade series, along with the Fleischer's Color Classics, Ub Iwerks' Comicolor Fairytales, Charles Mintz/Columbia's Color Rhapsodies, Walter Lantz' Cartune Classics, Warner Brothers' Merrie Melodies and Harman-Ising's Happy Harmonies, number among the entries in the "let's copy - I mean emulate - the Walt Disney Silly Symphonies" sweepstakes.
While, unfortunately, Gillett didn't bring such key Disney animators as Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore along with him to Van Beuren, he did bring Disney animator and later Schlesinger/Warners director Tom Palmer, whose films Buddy's Day Out and I've Got To Sing A Torch Song, the first two releases of the fledgling post-Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising WB animation crew, compelled the powers that were to beg Friz Freleng to take over the directorial reins.
The three Felix cartoons among the Rainbow Parades are a substantial step up from these Schlesinger (not especially) Looney Tunes, as well as other entries in the RKO Radio Pictures series produced by the Burt Gillett crew.
While Otto Messmer's name is not in any of the screen credits, it has been written in several places that he supervised )or at least acted as a consultant for) the Felix series at Van Beuren. Steve Stanchfield posted one of the 35mm prints at UCLA, scanned in standard definition, of a Felix cartoon from the Rainbow Parade series in his Cartoon Research entry Rainbow’s End: The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
In this animation buff's opinion, while Felix the Cat and the Goose That Laid The Golden Egg does not inhabit the deep realm of the subconscious imagination that the Otto Messmer silents and the 1990's Twisted Tales Of Felix TV series does, it remains a charming and enjoyable cartoon. It brings Felix more into a Fairbanks-ian action/adventure storyline, as opposed to the fourth wall-breaking tales starring the insouciant anti-hero of silents.
After the comeback in Burt Gillett's Rainbow Parade cartoons ended in 1936, due to Walt Disney Productions contracting with RKO for theatrical distribution (and instantaneously finishing the Van Beuren animation studio), Felix The Cat would continue a successful stint in comic strips until a series of made-for-TV Felix cartoons were produced by Trans-Lux, Joe Oriolo's studio, from 1959 to 1961. Oriolo worked with Otto Messmer on many a Felix comic book.
These cartoons - 260 of them - are not without their charms and have a good humor not seen often in low-budget made for TV series.
The TV series is frequently quite entertaining, to a significant degree because of the fun voice work throughout by Jack "Popeye" Mercer and Jim Tyer's always distinctive animation. One would think that limited animation would slow Tyer down, but in this and other television series he worked on, if anything, Tyer gives his hilariously extreme approach to extreme poses some extra zest. Tyer's characters move in a funny way and his humor serves the storylines.
While there have been Felix feature films and TV shows going into the 21st century, our favorite by far, produced three decades after the Trans-Lux Felix cartoons, remains the superb Twisted Tales Of Felix show. Many productions have brought the character back for an encore, but this series alone did a fantastic job both bringing back Messmer's imaginative 1920's approach - and also combined it with the phantasmagorical Fleischer school of animation from early talkies.
Although episodes of The Twisted Tales Of Felix can be found on YouTube, frankly, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog would REALLY like to see the complete series released on Blu-ray - and would buy that release in a heart beat.
There is an Official Felix the Cat YouTube channel, which includes several films seen in this post, as well as the following documentary about the magical cat.
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