Forty Winks (1930) Online

Forty Winks is the third to last Felix short made by the Pat Sullivan Studio. It starts with Felix conducting four other cats in a sing-along on the top of an apartment building. Two notes from the cats literally scratches the bald head of a neighbor. He wakes up furious and takes a bowling ball and knocks the cats out. The cats ignore him as Felix plays a flute with the other cats dancing. The flute notes now glide to the man's snoring mouth. The now awake furious neighbor takes a spray of either and aims them at the cats who quickly fall asleep except Felix who goes down the elevator which lands at a fireplace! Felix gets out of the fireplace and finds a couch as he prepares to fall asleep. He gets awakened by a baby nearby who cries uncontrollably. Felix throws him his bottle which he swallows after drinking from it. Felix then spills a wine glass which turns into a trumpet. That and his flute calms the baby down and brings alive some toy soldiers who then take a toy cannon and sink the boat in the picture frame behind the baby! The baby wants to play with toy cannon which Felix reluctantly agrees to. The baby hits Felix with eight cannons which become skate wheels that Felix uses to escape the house from. He then climbs the pole in the back yard to a clothes hanger with a pant that Felix prepares to sleep in. He's once again sound asleep until he dreams of a log getting sawed. That saw cuts the clothesline and Felix falls with the pants covering him while running. When he finally gets out, Felix kicks the pants! He then comes to a doghouse that he once again tries to sleep in but gets chased out by its puppy owner. The cat blows through the chimney throwing and locking the dog out! The dog cries causing a flood that takes the doghouse away. Felix climbs to the roof as the puppy swims to his home but Felix then takes two exclamation points above his head and uses them as a propeller to his tail with the roof as his wings! Having escaped once again, Felix gets knocked by a cloud and once again falls. This time he ends up floating up and down while he hears snoring. It's a hippo who's blowing Felix while he's sleeping! Felix once again falls asleep but suddenly the hippo stops snoring causing the cat to land in the hippo's mouth! Hippo wakes up, spits Felix out, and chases him. Felix then runs to a cliff, takes a gun, and with way too many bullets, forms a bridge that the cat crosses to the other side. As he gets there, he tickles the hippo with the bullet bridge so hard, the laughing hippo causes his cliff to fall landing on a seesaw that knocks the other occupant, a kangaroo (I think!) up to where Felix is. As Felix defeats the kangaroo, he pulls his nose and plays it like a violin! He then throws him up and down until he resembles a cradle which Felix then proceeds to fall asleep in. Peace and quiet at last! This short, while amusing, seems old hat both to the animators and the audiences who have watched Felix for eleven years now. More popular characters like Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop were entertaining audiences by this point. But Felix deserves a place in animation history as being the first character to really amuse people of all persuasions. As long as there are animation buffs who care about their history, Felix will live on in memory.

'Forty Winks' is one of the very last Felix the Cat cartoons from his original (Otto Messmer) period, but it's so crude that I mistook it for one of his very early efforts. The toon is technically a talkie; it was released with a soundtrack, but the audio consists entirely of unsynchronised noises and 'rhubarb' voice-work. Also, there's no real plot here: just a string of gags on the theme of sleep, or trying to get to sleep. First, Felix and a quartet of feline Felix clones are yowling while a man is trying to sleep; then Felix encounters various obstacles in his own attempts to tryst with Morpheus.

One thing which impresses me about the Felix toons (credit for this likely goes to Pat Sullivan, their producer) is the extensive re-use of character cels from one cartoon to the next ... so that, for instance, when Felix paces back and forth, or when he belly-laughs, cels from earlier Felix toons are re-used so as to save time, labour and expense. This actually impresses me positively, not negatively, because it's done very well and is only discernible if one has seen several Felixes and has a good memory.

In 'Forty Winks', I was also impressed by two different examples of 'cycle' animation, in which the same background art keeps passing the camera repeatedly -- in one case the usual horizontal cycle, in the other case a much less typical vertical cycle, as Felix plummets off a wall and keeps passing the same group of bricks while he falls. The worst (and most overdone) examples of cycle animation were done by Hanna-Barbera, who notoriously had Fred Flintstone passing the same tree over and over and over and bloody over. Messmer is using the same labour-saving device here, but using it with far more subtlety so that it's less noticeable (and much less annoying). In this same cartoon, I was impressed with an animation sequence of some toy soldiers marching: presumably inspired by the 1903 stage operetta 'Babes in Toyland'.

All of the Felix toons from the Messmer period feature bizarre gags involving Felix's detachable tail, which conveniently morphs into any object he needs. I laughed at one gag here, when Felix's tail interlocks with two exclamation marks emanating from his head to form a helicopter rotor, rendering Felix airborne. Alas, that's the only time I laughed in this below-average Felix cartoon, which I'll rate a mere 4 out of 10. Sleep tight, Felix!

poorly integrated sound--even worse than usual screaming baby

I am a fan of the original Felix the Cat cartoons. They are quite clever and were way ahead of their time when they began in 1919. However, over the years the quality of the cartoons stagnated. So, while Felix was great in 1919, the simple animation and poor backgrounds were not a problem because compared to the other cartoons because they, too, were pretty simple. But by the late 20s, the Fleischers and Disney were producing some beautiful and extremely well animated shorts...and Felix continued to look much like he did in 1919. What's worse, the cartoons were also less funny and original. And, in a last-ditch effort to make the Felix cartoons competitive, sound was VERY clumsily added to them post- production.

"Felix the Cat in Forty Winks" is an excellent example of how fart the quality of the shorts had slipped. The art is not particularly good, the sound horrible and the cartoon itself rather directionless and unfunny. Not one of Felix's better cartoons, that's for sure!