Sullivan’s studio disbanded while he was away but reopened when he was released from prison. On July 6, 1918, when the Motion Picture News announced Sullivan’s return to “Cartoon Making,” it didn’t mention where he had been in the interim, nor would any of the many articles that would come afterward. When Messmer returned from France eleven months later, he found the studio barely survivng. Needing a job, he went back to work for his boss, and their relationship returned to its former pattern: Sullivan drumming up new business while Messmer handled the creative work. They started making the Chaplin cartoons again, as well as short parodies of travelogue films, which had become popular in theaters.
By 1919, the studio was so busy it sometimes had to turn away job offers. That year, Earl Hurd, who worked for John Bray and had helped come up with cel technology, approached the studio to ask if it had any extra material to sell. He was putting together a package of films for Paramount and was short some cartoons.
Sullivan almost said no but hesitated because Messmer wanted to pitch something new. “If you want to do it on the side, you can do any little thing to satisfy them,” Sullivan told him. He then stressed that this wouldn’t be freelance work for which Messmer would be paid separately; Sullivan would still enjoy profits and credit on work Messmer did in his spare time. Messmer agreed.
Messmer tackled the side job on nights and weekends. His first task was coming up with a new character; he settled on an all-black cat because that design required less time to draw. Using one block of color saved him “making a lot of outlines, and solid black moves better,” he recalled. His sample cartoon, called Feline Follies, featured the cat—which would soon be named Felix—committing suicide in order to avoid the drudgery of domestic life after he knocks up his girlfriend, Miss Kitty White. It pushed the envelope and might have been in poor taste, but Paramount executive John King, who couldn’t stop laughing, loved it anyway. This is when King told Messmer to “make us another.”
Felix’s rise to fame was meteoric, a big bang moment. The name Felix was used for the first time in the character’s third film, The Adventures of Felix, released in December 1919, a date that sat on the edge of a new decade and big changes. The war was over and the world was ready to move on, to tip into the Jazz Age.
Felix stars alongside an animated version of Charlie Chaplin in Felix in Hollywood (1923).
Success like Felix’s can’t be engineered; timing and luck gathered in a perfect storm. But one factor in Felix’s success was crucial: he was the first recurring cartoon character with a distinct personality, a thinking character and not a mindless action figure. He communicated directly with the audience, winking at them from the screen, holding up a finger as if to say, “Watch this” before launching into some caper. These mannerisms echoed Messmer’s as he waltzed through the studio, pantomiming Felix’s movements for his staff: clenching his fists straight down when he was frustrated; pondering a question by pacing back and forth, hands behind his back; and the famous “eureka” gesture, slapping his fist into his palm when he had a revelation.
During Felix’s early years, Messmer sometimes drew from his war experience for storylines. Just before shipping out to France, he had married Anne Mason, who remained his wife for fifty-nine years. Some of Messmer’s friends, however, had returned home to discover that their girlfriends had left them. In Felix Turns the Tide, Felix likewise returns home from war to discover that his girlfriend has had kittens with another cat. But before Felix can get mad, he sees how she nags this other cat, which is saddled with a litter of needy, whining kittens. Suddenly, Felix is relieved, shrugging it off while laughing to a friend, “Gosh! I had a narrow escape!”
Nor did Messmer’s war-themed cartoons shy away from showing violent death. Mountains of limp bodies, x’s for eyes, pile up on the battlefield in Felix Turns the Tide, released in 1922, which featured Felix joining the Army after rats declare war on cats. In later years, after the movie industry imposed censorship rules on itself, audiences would no longer see images so graphic. A cartoon character might fall off a cliff, have an anvil crush its skull, or be blown up by dynamite, but viewers would never see it actually die. There was a window of time during Felix’s earliest years, however, when Messmer showed death graphically.
Felix’s on-screen movements—full of unexpected changes, improvisation, and metamorphic riffs—resonated with the decade’s new jazz sounds. His look, angular and pointy, moved away from art nouveau, the curvilinear and fluid motion of Winsor McCay, toward the fragmented cubism of postwar modernism. Felix’s rising popularity, however, soon demanded adjustments to his appearance. Animators needed a look that allowed them to draw him faster, so they could meet increased demand for more cartoons. Animator Bill Nolan, a former Hearst employee, helped Messmer develop a look that was more round than angular, helping smooth Felix’s on-screen motion and making him easier to draw. Rather than diminish Felix’s popularity, the changes seemed to boost it. One psychologist thought the rounder head, accentuated by a smaller body, triggered the audience’s innate affection for babies. Messmer himself put this analysis in terms of psychology, saying, “Felix represented a child’s mind . . . and that’s why I think it took hold. He’d wonder where the wind came from, or how far away is a star? How deep is the ocean? Things like that . . . then, with some gag, he would solve the problem.”
Pundits of the Roaring Twenties excitedly declared Felix the icon of their era. “He becomes the impossible,” Marcel Brion of the Académie Française wrote in 1928. “Nothing is more familiar to him than the extraordinary, and when he is not surrounded by the fantastic, he creates it.” The literary world was also enthusiastic. Aldous Huxley wrote in Vanity Fair that European filmmakers should study Felix cartoons—this would help improve their humor, he said, and guide them to be less pretentious. George Bernard Shaw gave particularly high praise, seeing the same potential in cartoons—as a high art—that Winsor McCay saw. “If Michelangelo were now alive,” he said, “I have not the slightest doubt that he would have his letter box filled with proposals from the great film firms to concentrate his powers to the delineation of Felix the Cat instead of the Sistine Chapel.”
Chapter 7
“How to Fire a Lewis Machine Gun”
In the years after World War I, Max Fleischer found working for John Bray frustrating. Max was still one of Bray’s best employees, but Bray’s interests had shifted. He was no longer interested in making the kind of comedies that inspired Max; he was now focused on training and industrial films.
During the war, Bray saw the contracts going to defense contractors and smelled a lucrative new opportunity. The military would need training films, and animation offered a way to illustrate certain concepts much better than live action could. After meeting with Army officials at West Point, Bray procured a contract to make the films they needed, many of which would rely on Fleischer’s rotoscoping process. When the Army then tried to draft Fleischer, Bray asked, “How can I make films when you draft all my men?”
Bray had a fair point, so the Army agreed to an arrangement. Fleischer was relieved of regular service and sent to “Fire School” at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he would supervise the production of training films made there. A dusty scrubland surrounded by even dustier scrubland, Fort Sill was a far cry from New York, but Fleischer didn’t seem to mind. Clad in a custom-tailored wardrobe of drab olives and muted browns so he would appear at least somewhat Army-like,