Felix the Cat Signaled the Beginning of Silent Cartoons
Note: This is the hundred-and-third in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my third favorite 1919 film, FELINE FOLLIES, directed by Otto Messmer.
OK, let me get this out of the way: were there better films than FELINE FOLLIES, the proto-Felix the Cat cartoon, released in 1919? Certainly. But I feel compelled to give it its due as the beginning of a whole new, recognizable era of cartoons, especially since I couldn’t really justify giving Felix or even Disney shorts of the 1920s such an honor.
FELINE FOLLIES isn’t explicitly the debut of Felix the Cat, but it might as well be. The short, featuring a “Master Tom,” was directed by Otto Messmer and produced by Pat Sullivan. The dispute over who created Felix has raged over the decades, with both Messmer and Sullivan claiming ownership. Ultimately, they’ve both been credited for the genesis of the idea for Felix. But what you see in FELINE FOLLIES doesn’t really resemble the Felix you know now, and in fact, Felix didn’t really look like “himself” until a 1924 redesign.
But as muted as FELINE FOLLIES is compared to later Felix cartoons, there are still some Felix eccentricities to be found. The agency of the cat’s tail is present, with it coming off “Tom’s” body and forming a question mark, a device that would help Felix many times over the years. FELINE FOLLIES has an overwhelming number of “clever” intertitles and none of the funny business in the short is entirely inspired, but the cohesion of the whole plot and movement is admirable for 1919.
As I’ve addressed, Felix the Cat was, in a way, the creator of the silent cartoon short as we know it. Like a lot of pioneers, many actually came before him. The experimental animation of J. Searle Dawley, Émile Cohl, and Winsor McCay, sure, but also, in this form, John Randolph Bray. Bray opened his own animation studio in 1914 and fostered talents like Paul Terry and Max Fleischer, who both also contributed to this new era of cartoons.
But Felix created the mischievous funny animal archetype on a grand scale; Felix was incredibly popular for, in hindsight, a relatively brief period of time. But he was so popular that Walt Disney essentially copied the character for his Julius, a sidekick in his original Newton Laugh-O-Grams and Alice series. And these core principles were transposed into Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and numerous other characters outside the Disney ecosystem. FELINE FOLLIES is not a master class in animation or a thoroughly entertaining jaunt through another world, but it’s worth watching for the beginning of the paradigm we would come to know so well.
