Right. Who am I, you ask, possibly squinting into a monocle as you sip your champagne, to decide what are the fifty greatest cartoons ever made? I’m nobody, is the answer, and I wouldn’t have the audacity to make such a claim. No, this list was compiled by over a thousand animators, cartoon historians and animation professionals, according to Jerry Beck, editor of
The Fifty Greatest Cartoons, as Selected by 1000 Animation Professionals. And surely they know their stuff?
So we’re going to do a countdown here, looking into each of these and if I can get a video for them I’ll display that here too, though who knows? Some of these may be too old, rare or just out of circulation. But we’ll see. Either way, we’ll obviously be going backwards, counting down to the top cartoon ever. And we begin, of course, with number
Title: “Felix in Hollywood”
Year released: 1923
Character(s): Felix the Cat
Story by: Otto Messmer
Animation by: Otto Messmer/Bill Nolan
Directed by: Otto Messmer
Studio: Margaret J. Winkler Studios
We have of course seen this before, in my article about the feisty little feline who became the world’s first cartoon character to kickstart a merchandising line, and whose image was even immortalised on aircraft and tanks during World War II. It’s quite long for the time period, almost feature length really at almost nine and a half minutes, and of course it’s silent, as sound had not yet come to cartoons at this time. But in the typically innovative way animators had of overcoming this - on the surface huge - shortcoming, Felix is able to talk via not only crude speech balloons but also his incredible expressive face and the actions he undertakes.
As the cartoon opens, Felix’s owner, a ham actor in every sense, bewails the fact that he must “sacrifice his art and go into movies” (as if this is a foregone conclusion; how many aspiring actors turn up at Hollywood expecting to write their names into history, only to end up bussing tables and desperately trying to catch the eye of a director?) and sends Felix out to get them transport. Evidence of his overindulgent acting is provided when he tells Felix, verbatim, “Go ye forth and procure the wherewithal for sustenance and* transportation to Hollywood!” Right.
So off Felix goes forth, and asks himself - and the audience - how he, a cat, is supposed to get money?* But by now we all know Felix is a resourceful kitty, and he comes across a guy closing down his shoe shop, goes to him and says he can make it profitable. If he does, the owner promises, he’ll pay Felix 500 dollars. That should get them to Hollywood! So Felix goes into action. Getting some chewing gum he makes sure it is spread all over town, and as people get stuck in it and have to leave the shoes behind, they all head for the shoe store, which quickly sells out, as Felix promised it would. So he pays Felix and they’re on their way.
Except, not quite. The owner has no intention of taking his cat with him, so Felix has to bend the rules of logic as only he can, first replacing his owner’s umbrella, but that doesn’t work, so then he takes the place of his bag, and they’re both off to Hollywood. As soon as they arrive, Felix ditches his nasty owner and heads off to make a career in the movies. He comes unstuck though when, while demonstrating his talents to “the boss” at Static Studios, he does a Charlie Chaplin impression, calling it original, and is admonished by the little tramp himself for stealing his stuff. This is an allusion to the belief that Mesmer created Felix and based him on the movements of the great silent actor.
Chased out of the studio, Felix ends up answering a call for help from Douglas Fairbanks (it says here; I wouldn’t know him - not that old!) who is being attacked by wasps. He grabs a gun from a passing cowboy and shoots two of them but then runs out of bullets. Using the cartoon logic again, he has the last one shoot its stinger at him, grabs it, uses it as a sword and defeats the last wasp. The whole thing turns out to have been a movie, and Cecil B. De Mille, impressed with Felix’s acting, offers him a contract. The little guy has made it in Tinseltown.
Comments: Although I’m glad to see Felix in the countdown (this is is only entry in it; whether they restricted it to one per character or not I don’t know) I’m a little sad to see him so low down on it, right at the very bottom. Still, given that it is a silent one and so early I suppose you can’t expect the black-and-white wonder cat to be measuring up to the likes of Road Runner, The Flintstones or Mickey Mouse. As a story I find this well written, for what it is. It’s obviously meant mostly to showcase Felix’s ingenuity, from the sticking of gum on the road to impersonating his owner’s bag, right up to using the stinger as a sword, and in ways it presages Felix’s actual debut in Hollywood for real, when he would become one of the most popular and famous cartoon characters on the screen.
The usage of speech balloons, though not at that time new, is still well handled, and there’s a kind of villain in the unpleasant owner, who vanishes from the story once the two arrive in Hollywood. The usage of caricatures of famous film stars and directors (apparently) is clever too, and anchors the cartoon to the experiences of movie-goers at the time, who no doubt would have recognised them all. There’s a happy ending, and it’s the happier in that Felix believes at this point his chance in movies is gone, and rescues Fairbanks not to impress anyone, but as a simply altruistic act, which ends up working out for him in ways he could not have expected.
The animation is good: Felix both walks upright as an anthro and on all fours like a cat, switching fluidly between both, making sure we never forget he is a cat, and the likes of sight-lines, question marks and the usage of his tail and body as other objects is a real trademark of what Felix had become known for, and would continue to do, as his popularity grew through the next few decades. Apart from all that, other than a slight shake at the beginning of the movie, for something produced almost a hundred years ago as I write (!) this cartoon is remarkably steady and clear, with no signs of deterioration. It doesn’t say it’s been restored or anything, so I have to assume this is how it was when drawn and animated in 1923.
My own personal rating: 8/10 taking everything into account: the age, the minimal techniques and technology available, the plot, the animation, the jokes.