#Cat artoon upgrade
The three Van Beuren Studios Felix shorts are fairly well animated and feature lavish color and backgrounds, and as such are a considerable animation upgrade from the original cartoons-no surprise, considering their director, Burt Gillett, was a former Disney animator and director.But come the 1922-1924 period, when Messmer starting hiring more animators, including the esteemed Bill Nolan, the animation got much more rubbery, fluid and appealing. The early cartoons were very stiff and rather crudely made.
#Cat artoon series
Animation Bump: The series got much more refined in its animation as time went on.Tropes Related To The Silent and Golden Age Felix Cartoons and Comics It may take a while before Universal decides to do anything with the cartoons.Ī recap page for these cartoons can be found here. So far, there has never been an official home video release of the surviving cartoons, due to a combination of the deteriorating film elements and the slew of public domain releases in the market. Universal gained ownership of the cartoons and the character in August 2016 after acquiring DreamWorks, who had bought the character and related material in question from Don Oriolo in 2014. Oriolo himself took over art duties of the comic once Otto left, and would eventually end up running the iconic made-for-TV revival of the series.Īlthough the majority of these cartoons have become Public Domain material, the ancillary rights to all of the original cartoons, including the remaining original film elements, merchandising/licensing rights and the copyrights to the few cartoons that didn't lapse into the public domain, are owned by Universal Studios, the parent company of Felix the Cat owner DreamWorks Animation. Otto Messmer drew the lion's share of the comic books up to his retirement around 1954, with Joe Oriolo and Jim Tyer sometimes moonlighting artwork in them. The newspaper comics often carried a topper page centered on a parrot named Laura and her owners, and the comic books often had an anthology format that featured side stories of oneshot or bit-player characters alongside the main Felix stories. While the cartoons were put on ice, the classic Felix series managed to find new life in the form of various newspaper comics and comic books, with the former running all the way up to the series transition into the Joe Oriolo era. Three shorts were made for this revival, and evidence has surfaced that at least two more were planned, but the Van Beuren studio abruptly went belly-up in 1936 before anything beyond story and design work had been done. Being helmed by ex-Disney director Burt Gillett, they have very little in common with the Otto Messmer cartoons, completely throwing out the comic like art style and surrealistic tone in favor of pure fairy tale style cartoons, with Felix himself being revamped into a more child like character.
In 1936, a few years after the original Pat Sullivan studio that produced the cartoons had folded, a very brief three short revival of the series was made by the Van Beuren cartoon studio and distributed by RKO as part of Van Beuren's Rainbow Parade cartoon series. Copley Pictures distributed the sound cartoons from 1929 to 1931. In 1928, Educational ended distribution and several shorts were reissued by First National Pictures.
Paramount distributed the earliest cartoons from 1919 to 1921, while Winkler distributed the shorts from 1922 up to 1925, the year when Educational Pictures took over the distribution of the shorts.
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