Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in 1919 by Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan during the silent film era. An anthropomorphic juvenile black cat with white eyes, a black body, and a giant grin, he is often considered one of the most recognized cartoon characters in history. Felix was the first fully realized recurring animal character in the history of American film animation.
Felix originated from the studio of Australian cartoonist-film entrepreneur Pat Sullivan. Either Sullivan himself or his lead animator, American Otto Messmer, created the character. What is certain is that Felix emerged from Sullivan's studio, and cartoons featuring the character became well known in popular culture. Aside from the animated shorts, Felix starred in a comic strip (drawn by Sullivan, Messmer and later Joe Oriolo) beginning in 1923, and his image soon adorned merchandise such as ceramics, toys, and postcards. Several manufacturers made stuffed Felix toys. Jazz bands such as Paul Whiteman's played songs about him (1923's "Felix Kept On Walking" and others).
By the late 1920s, with the arrival of sound cartoons, Felix's success was fading. The new Disney shorts of Mickey Mouse made the silent offerings of Sullivan and Messmer, who were then unwilling to move to sound production, seem outdated. In 1929, Sullivan decided to make the transition and began distributing Felix sound cartoons through Copley Pictures. The sound Felix shorts proved to be a failure and the operation ended in 1932. Felix saw a brief three-cartoon resurrection in 1936 by the Van Beuren Studios.
Felix cartoons made their American television debut in 1953. Joe Oriolo introduced a redesigned, "long-legged" Felix, with longer legs, a much smaller body, and a larger, rounder head with no whiskers and no teeth. Oriolo also added new characters and gave Felix a "Magic Bag of Tricks" that could assume an infinite variety of shapes at Felix's behest. The cat has since starred in other television programs and in two feature films. As of the 2010s, Felix is featured on a variety of merchandise from clothing to toys. Joe's son Don Oriolo later assumed creative control of Felix.
Early versions of Felix the Cat entered the public domain in 1994 under the Copyright Act of 1976, however the character's name still remains trademarked. In 2014, Don Oriolo sold the trademark and remaining copyrights to the character to DreamWorks Animation via DreamWorks Classics, which is now part of Comcast's NBCUniversal division via Universal Pictures.
In 2002, TV Guide ranked Felix the Cat number 28 on its "50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time" list.
History Background In mid-1915, with the financial backing of then-Universal treasure Pat Powers, Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan opened his own studio in New York City, and set about creating an animated adaptation of his William F. Marriner's comic strip Sambo and His Funny Noises strip - about a stereotypical African American child - which he renamed as Sammy Johnsin to avoid paying Marriner's estate royatlies. While at Universal, Sullivan met a young aspiring animator named Otto Messmer who had created a short entitled Motor Matt. Messmer eventually went to work for Sullivan in early-1916, and quickly became his top animator. By 1917 Messmer was directing many of the studio's films while Sullivan concentrated on business matters. A total of twelve Sammy Johnsin cartoons were made between 1916 and 1917, before being discontinued. The studio replaced the Sammy Johnsin series with several other short lived series including: Fearless Freddy and Willie Slate by Messmer, and Willie Winks, Boomer Bill, Boxcar Bill and Hardrock Doome by Sullivan and other members of the staff - as well as various one-shot cartoons. In early-1917, Sullivan arranged a deal with Charlie Chaplin, to produce a series based on his character of The Tramp. Chaplin sent thirty photographs of himself in different poses to serve as a guide for Messmer and the animators which would later profoundly influence Felix. Work on the Chaplin series was interrupted when the studio closed for nine months between 1917-18 due to Sullivan's arrest and imprisonment, during which time Messmer was drafted into World War I. After Sullivan's release in mid-1918, the studio re-opened and work on the Chaplin series resumed with Sullivan hiring Bill Cause as a temporary replacement, until Messmer was able to return on May 28, 1919. The Sullivan studio made a total of ten Chaplin cartoons before concluding series in October 1919.
Creation and authorship dispute
In June 1919, John Randolph Bray - who had been producing a variety of animated and live-action short subjects in the Paramount-Bray Picturgraph screen magazine since 1915 - ended his distribution deal with Paramount Pictures in favor of more lucrative deal with Samuel Goldwyn. Paramount responded by rebranding the Picturgraph as the Paramount Screen Magazine, and hired animators Earl Hurd and Frank Moser to produce new cartoons for the program. Hurd began falling behind schedule, so he reached out to Pat Sullivan and asked if he could supply a cartoon for the magazine. The result was the cartoon Feline Follies – released on November 9, 1919 – which featured the character of "Master Tom", who would later be known as Felix the Cat.
It is disputed whether this short and the character of Felix the Cat were created by Pat Sullivan or Otto Messmer. During the height of Felix's popularity and until his death in 1933, Sullivan claimed sole credit for the character's creation. Beginning in May 1924, while on a six-week tour of England, Sullivan gave the first account of Felix's origin that he would frequently repeat:
On other occasions, he claimed that Felix had been inspired by Rudyard Kipling's The Cat that Walked by Himself. As Australian cartoonist, and Sullivan's friend, Kerwin Maegraith told The Sydney Mail in 1936, Sullivan decided to name the character Felix after Australia Felix: a term from Australian history and a title of a a popular 1917 novel by Henry Handel Richardson. Maegraith also stated that Sullivan decided to make Felix a black cat, after West-Indian-born black Australian boxer Peter Felix - who as Sullivan claimed: "...used to frighten us kids in Sydney." Australian writer Hugh McCrae claimed he shared an apartment with Pat Sullivan just before Felix was created. As a 1953 article in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: "It comes properly as a postscript that in New York McCrae shared a flat with Pat Sullivan, the famed creator of 'Felix, the Cat'. When a film about Felix was being planned, Sullivan suggested that McCrae should do the drawings while he (Sullivan) supplied the ideas. McCrae refused and has regretted it ever since."
Beginning in 1967, Messmer claimed he had created the short Feline Follies almost entirely by himself. As he remembered, Sullivan almost turned down Hurd's offer since he was busy, but ultimately agreed, and told Messmer: "If you want to do it on the side, you can do any little thing to satisfy them." Messmer then animated the film by himself on nights and weekends in his home in New Jersey. To save himself time, he decided to make a film about a little black cat.
Like Sullivan, Messmer also claimed to have been inspired by Kipling's The Cat Who Walked by Himself. Messmer also stated he was influenced by Charlie Chaplin, whose pantomime action Messmer had studied when creating Sullivan's Chaplin series. As Messmer recalled: "...that rubbed off and we used a lot of that kind of action in Felix. We thought a funny walk sometimes would get a laugh without [a] script idea. Or wiggling of the tail, things of that type... Chaplin had a great influence on us."
Some historians have suggested that Felix's design - particularly his black body - evolved from blackface minstrel shows. While Messmer never outright stated this, instead saying he simply made Felix a black cat "...because it saves making a lot of outlines, and solid black moves better." However when discussing work on Sullivan's previous Sammy Johnsin series, he did acknowledge similarities between him and Felix:
As animation historian Donald Crafton writes:
Australian cartoonists and historians have disputed Messmer's claims, with Australian cartoonist Lindsay Foyle stating: "...it's the American claiming - yet again - something that was created elsewhere to be their own when there's ample evidence to suggest that they only borrowed it..." Australian cartoonist Gerald Carr noted that the comic-style effects in Feline Follies, and the lettering in the dialogue captions matches Sullivan's art-style and handwriting as opposed to Messmer's. In particular, Carr notes that towards the end of the cartoon, one of the cat's says "Alo Mum" - with the word for mother being spent the Australian-British way of 'M-U-M' as opposed to the American way of 'M-O-M'. Australian animation historians Dan and Lienors Torre, also note that some of the animation in Feline Follies at times seems to resemble Sullivan's comic strip artwork as opposed to Messmer's, and that "... there are a few sequences in Feline Follies that do appear to have been completed in rather contrasting styles, which might also point to the possibility that more than one animator was involved." While Messmer claimed to have animated the majority of the cartoon by himself at home, he also acknowledged that he eventually brought his rough animation drawings into the studio for "...a couple of girls who inked and blackened it in." Therefore it is possible Sullivan may have had some involvement with Feline Follies.
According to Judy Nelson of the State Library of New South Wales, the now-lost Sullivan-produced short called The Tail or Thomas Kat (1917) - contained a precursor to Felix, and was copyrighted in Pat Sullivan's name. However, as the owner of the studio, every film produced by the Sullivan studios (even those that weren't directed by him) were copyrighted to Pat Sullivan specifically. John Canemaker also points out that by 1917 Messmer (who had been working for the studio for over a year) was already directing many of the studio's shorts himself, while Sullivan had mainly resided himself to handling business matters. According to historian David Gerstein and film preservationist Tommy José Stathes, the earliest known existence of a black cat appearing in a Sullivan studios short is The Love Affair of Ima Knut, which predates the The Tail of Thomas Kat by one week and was directed by Messmer.Gerstein, David; Stathes, Tommy (2020). Cartoon Roots: Otto Messmer's Feline Follies Blu-Ray/DVD (booklet). Cartoons On Film.
Dan and Lienors Torres also note that a Black cat character appeared in Sullivan's Chaplin cartoons that debuted when Messmer was away serving in World War I, and an add in Motion Picture World (most likely drawn by Sullivan) for the first entry in the series - How Charlie Captured the Kaiser (released on September 2, 1918) - features a black cat reminiscent of the one in Feline Follies. However, as historian Kevin Scott Collier points out, production of the Chaplin series of cartoons had begun in Spring 1917 under Messmer's direction, which was interrupted by Sullivan's arrest and incarceration. Prior to this Messmer, and his team had already completed roughly 17-20 minutes on the Chaplin project - including all of How Charlie Captured the Kaiser. The Torres also note that the cartoon Charley on the Farm contains a few gags similar to some of the ones in Feline Follies, stating: "... if nothing else, does point to the fact that the studio was very prone to recycle gags and characters from film to film."