100th Anniversary: Felix the Cat

by Tim

This weekend marks the 100th birthday of cinema's first cartoon superstar. On November 9, 1919, Paramount released Feline Follies, produced by Pat Sullivan and animated by Otto Mesmer, a short gag-driven cartoon starring a black cat named Master Tom; the character was an immediate hit and by the time the third cartoon featuring the character came out five weeks later (they worked fast back in those days), he'd been renamed Felix. The rest is history: Felix the Cat was a bonafide phenomenon, igniting a craze for funny, mutable animals that hasn't let up at any point in the last century. Even Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, the cinematic icon to end all icons, was initially conceived as a blatant Felix knock-off swapping out the cat's pointy ears for circles that were easier to draw.

You might not guess that to watch Feline Follies, which feels like an artifact from a lost civilization. This is what cartoons looked like in the 1910s: empty white voids full of characters who move in straight lines with few distinct movements, speaking in speech bubbles imported directly from newspaper comic strips...

It's almost unbearably primitive to our eyes, but in 1919, this was some of the wildest animation out there. It's mildly surrealistic: Tom's tail detaches to become a question mark, and he and his lady love, Miss Kitty, transform musical notes into go-karts. Gags like these would become a hallmark of the Felix series in the 1920s: Felix's detachable tail, which could serve basically any function imaginable, became one of the signature jokes of the character. Messmer was one of the first animators to fully embrace the flexibility of the medium, not just in the endlessly manipulable body of Felix himself, but also in the internally-coherent illogic of the animated universe, a playground for physically impossible slapstick. The Felix cartoons didn't single-handedly invent this kind of cartoon humor, but they probably did more than anything else to popularize it, till it became the dominant mode  of animation for decades to come.

The popularity of the Felix shorts didn't last beyond the silent era: Sullivan was slow to embrace sound effects and music, and by the end of 1929, the character had been buried by the groundbreaking and immensely popular Mickey shorts being made at the Disney studio. There have been attempts throughout the years to revive Felix, including a successful 1959 television series and a flop feature film from 1988, but nothing that's had the staying power, or the raw creativity, of the initial run of silent shorts. Even so, Felix's legacy is secure: his face is one of the most recognisable in all of cartoondom, a  stand-in for an entire ethos of animated filmmaking around the world. And the medium he helped to define remains vibrant and vital a century later.

Five essential Felix shorts:
Felix Saves the Day (1922)
Felix in Hollywood (1923)
Felix Monkeys with Magic (1925)
Flim Flam Films (1927)
April Maze (1930)

Comments

[Jaragon]

That short needs a different music score

[Volvagia]

Hmm. I almost think if live-action silent features used THAT caption method, sound might have taken a bit longer to catch on. Probably only 2-4 more years, but enough for a few more out and out classics.

[Owl]

"The trysting place" -- love how it's almost pre-Freudian. Almost.