Woos Whoopee

One of Otto Messmer's most unusual Felix cartoons. It portrays Felix as an inebriated feline being chased by all kinds of demons only to be welcomed by the greatest demon of all, the angry wife. Very original and the Slingshot Entertainment version of Felix Feline Follies has done a great job in preserving one of the greatest animated characters of all time.

Essentially, all this cartoon is is Felix the Cat's drunken descent in absurd madness, which isn't very typical of family friendly animations, but it works really well. All throughout animation history, animators have delved into the rather surreal and bizarre depths of their imaginations and have created experiences that border on incomprehensibility in a fun and funny way. "Woos Whoopee" is no exception; it's a ridiculous, over exaggerated surrealist comedy in which the laws of logic are cheerfully thrown out the window and all sense is lost, and is replaced by a fantastic and wholly entertaining breed of utter nonsense. A must watch if you can appreciate the lunacy.

In the 1920s, the makers of Felix the Cat were on top of the world. Their cartoon creation was hugely popular--the biggest cartoon star in the world--and he deserved to be since the cartoons were so incredibly creative and funny. Yet, by the early 1930s, the studio stopped making Felix cartoons. And, through the next several decades, attempts to revive the series all failed--mostly because these new versions had little to do with the originals. So why did the original cartoons stop in the early 30s after so much success? Well, because of a lack of innovation. While Fleischer Brothers Studio and Disney were making sound cartoons in the late 1920s, Pat Sullivan Cartoons (makers of Felix) STILL produced silents into the 1930s. And then, the cartoons featured mostly added sound effects instead of true sound--something you'd find in other more progressive cartoons.

Now you might be thinking 'WAIT--I just saw "Woos Whoopee" and it DID have sound'. Well, that's true and it's not. It originally was a silent and some time years later, sound effects were added as were some very rudimentary verbalizations (which were not at all synchronized with the characters' lips). And, even with these added sounds, these were added after the series was dead or nearly dead. Plus, they really didn't work all that well because while Disney went back and added sound to two of his silents with Mickey ("Plane Crazy" and "Galloping Gauchos"), he and his studio soon was using real, honest to goodness sound and these early sound experiments were soon surpassed--while Felix was still basically a silent star living in the talking picture era.

So is "Woos Whoopee" any good as a silent? Well, not really. This is because there are no jokes--or at least very few. You mostly see Felix doing a lot of inappropriate things for a cartoon character (getting drunk, hallucinating and smoking), none of it is funny aside from the shock value of seeing a cartoon character misbehave. All in all, one of the worst of the original Felix cartoons and, unfortunately, a harbinger of things to come.

The title of this Felix toon is 'Woos Whoopee', which makes sense if you view a print with the original credits. Since Felix received star billing -- his name above the title -- the credits manage to read 'Felix the Cat Woos Whoopee'. At this time, Felix the Cat was indeed a hugely popular box-office draw, fully deserving of star billing. Too bad he couldn't keep up with a certain mouse from a competing studio.

As another reviewer has already noted, there's a Mrs Felix in this cartoon: a white cat. I find it a bit confusing when a cartoon character in a long-running series will acquire a wife or children (or both) to serve the plot of one particular toon, only for these relations to vanish without a trace afterward.

This American cartoon was produced and released during Prohibition, so domestic audiences undoubtedly were highly amused by the sequences of Felix boozing it up with his cronies in some speakeasy. (Can a silent film have a speakeasy?) Also, there's some clever animation in the depictions of the monsters Felix sees in the throes of his drunken trip home. One unfortunate trait of American comedy films (toon and live-action) during the Prohibition era was that they got very easy laughs just by mentioning or showing booze, and often the scriptwriters got lazy by relying too heavily on this device. (Like all those 1970s comedies that got cheap laughs from jokes about marijuana.)

One sequence in 'Woos Whoopee' intrigued me very much ... then disappointed me. At one point, Felix moves so close to the camera that the black part of his head fills the entire frame. I expected this to become an 'invisible cut', the cinematic device later used by Hitchcock in 'Rope': the camera would pull back from Felix's black head to reveal that it had actually cut to an entirely different dark object. I was disappointed when this didn't happen, and the black object continued to be Felix. Oh, well...

There are quite a few imaginative visual compositions in this short toon, very cleverly animated on a low budget. I didn't laugh at all during 'Woos Whoopee', but I did enjoy it. My rating: 7 out of 10.

I can't imagine, even in the Twenties, that this cartoon was very palatable. Felix is out all night carousing at a nightclub. He drinks to excess and acts in a really sad way. His wife waits for him at home, wielding a rolling pin. He starts hallucinating; we would call it the DT's. He uses a gun to shoot at those he encounters. There is really little humor in this cartoon. If anything, it is hard to watch.