It's 1928. Time for another round of Felix the Cat shorts!
In Comicalamities, Felix enlists the help of the artist who draws him to woo a female cat. In Astronomeus, Felix harpoons a bicyclist on Saturn and gets booted to Mars which he repopulates with thousands of cats. Outdoor Indore features our hero falling prey to a firehose accident which fires him halfway around the world.
All three of these are more inventive than anything Walt Disney has put out to this point in history. My personal favorite was Comicalamities which is clearly influenced by Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell shorts. The artist becomes a character himself, first drawing Felix then adding a tail to his impatient creation. When Felix comes across a lady cat, he has the artist give her a makeover.
Beyond the connections to Fleischer's earlier work, the animation here is beautiful. Unlike most cartoons, Felix actually moves in three dimensions here, swimming toward and away from the camera during an underwater sequence. I particularly love the ending of this one which is both surprising and totally consistent with the previous set-up.
While Comicalamities was the best of the three, the other two are fantastic. Some of the ideas present here are out-of-this-world brilliant. From the creature design on Mars to Felix' use of a tiger's stripes as a ladder to him charming two snakes to turn into a bike, there are animation ideas here I love. It's fun and whimsical if not laugh-out loud funny.
I knew nothing of Felix the Cat cartoons before starting 100 Years of Movies, but they are becoming one of my favorite stops during each year of cinematic history. Not as funny as the Warner Bros. cartoons I grew up, they are fun diversion and impressive in their animation style.
Comicalamities: ****1/2 out of *****
Astronomeus: **** out of *****
Outdoor Indore: ***1/2 out of *****
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