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Entries in Felix the Cat (2)

Sunday
Nov102019

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...

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Thursday
Jun192014

Tim's Toons: Thoughts on animation's new reboot fever

Tim here. It’s been a weird week for fans of old animation. Nathaniel already said his piece (which is indistinguishable from mine) on the news that Warner is re-rebooting Scooby-Doo a mere 12 years after the first grisly first live-action/animated reboot of the ‘70s cartoon (the recent death of Casey Kasem, mere days before the announcement, now looms as some sort of grim karmic metaphor). And in the last couple of days, we’ve been hit with the first promotional artwork for an in-development Popeye feature at Sony Animation, and the news that DreamWorks has purchased the rights to Felix the Cat from the family of the 95-year-old slapstick animal’s creator.

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