Studio: Pat Sullivan Studio
Distributor: Paramount Pictures (Paramount Screen Magazine)
Short Synopsis
A black tomcat, called Master Tom here and later renamed Felix, goes courting in Pussyville. He serenades a white cat, and when she responds he declares he will devote all nine of his lives to her. The caterwauling wakes the whole neighbourhood. While he is out, the mice of his house seize their chance and eat everything in the kitchen. His owner comes home, finds the mess, blames the cat, and throws him out. Homeless, Tom goes to his sweetheart for comfort, only to discover that she has a large litter of kittens, and that he is their father. Faced with family life, he runs off to the local gasworks and ends it all by breathing in the coal gas.
Why It Matters
- The film already has the quality that made Felix a star: a cat who thinks. His body language is expressive and his moods are readable from his pose alone, the kind of graphic economy that runs through Messmer's later Felix films. The ending, a romantic comedy that closes on suicide, is startlingly dark for a cartoon.
- It is the first appearance of the character who became Felix the Cat, the first animated star to become a worldwide celebrity, with merchandise, songs and imitators across the 1920s. Within months the cat had his name and his own series.
Notes and Trivia
- Who created Felix is disputed. Studio owner Pat Sullivan took the credit during his lifetime; Otto Messmer said in 1970s interviews that Sullivan, overloaded, handed him the job of an extra film for Paramount, and that he drew it alone at home.
- Black cats had appeared in Sullivan productions before: The Tail of Thomas Kat (1917), now lost, and a cat scene in the Charlie Chaplin cartoon Charlie in the Farm (1919), whose main gag is reused here.
- The surviving film is in the public domain in the United States.
- See also: Frolics at the Circus (1920).