Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 4 (Final Part)

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

What a better way to issue in a brand new month than by closing up on this strange, delightful acid trip to my eyes that is this movie?

...I can probably think of a million better ways to celebrate the month of September than by sitting all by my lonesome in a quiet room and watching the hopes and dreams of Hungarian animators get silently crushed by horrible time schedules and weak budgets, but since I went for a specific theme for my blog, this is what I'll write about. Otherwise I'd be boring you all about anecdotes involving the colorful people that inhabit my dorms.

Anyways, Felix the Cat! I just recently learned this, but there are a couple Felix the Cat black and white shorts involving circuses. There aren't any women dancing in bubbles or overweight alligators with throat scars in them, but this proves that I was wrong about the filmmakers. They were making a really clever allusion to "Felix Wins Out" and "The Circus", very classic silent 1920's shorts.

...either that, or they were making this crap up as the film was being produced. It's hard to tell.  

NO IT ISN'T, FELIX.

Also, you know how I said that the animation is only going to get even worse as time goes on? Well, yeah, that was mainly to warn you ahead of time about the last portion of the film. Even fans of this movie can't excuse the last fifteen minutes of this film, it's that bad. Characters start to melt, eyeballs start to slide off faces, animation clips starts to be reused, and it's just a horrible thing to watch because you know they could do better because anyone could do better than this. It's a sliding scale of badness with this film, unfortunately, and it's really sad when the high point of any animated film is when the main character is being held captive by an overweight lizard mutant.

So be prepared for the final reckoning as we see this movie finally get out of the circus and reach its conclusion. And trust me, you will be disappointed once you see how this movie ends in...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 4!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 3

Part 1.
Part 2.

Time to revisit this movie again. I don't like leaving things unfinished, especially if they're nonsensical blog posts where I, someone who's over 20, decide to watch a film about talking cats and try to invoke some form of deep commentary on it.

That, and it's just too easy to point and laugh at the fact that the movie makers thought that any of these plot developments were a good idea. I mean, sure, I guess you can give them points for creativity by having the princess rescue plot take place in a circus filled with tap-dancing mice hybrids, a giant spacelizard who honestly outstages the actual villain, and radioactive interdimensional mud mutants, but yeah, so far my opinion on this movie is that it's crazy but poorly animated movie that would have some great ideas if it wasn't attached to a brand name that it's not doing any justice to.

And it's only going to get crazier and even more badly animated from here on out. The good news is that I have only one or two more parts to do of this movie, but the bad news is that I'm getting to the parts where the movie starts to lose momentum and, if possible, get even worse. I have to wonder if this movie was on a tight "don't spend ANY money at all!" budget once we leave the circus portion because it really shows. The animation starts to drop in quality (even more than before), the plot starts to fall apart onscreen, characters stop being characters and just meander on the screen just to exist, and well...okay, perhaps I'm giving too much away.

This part of the movie, unlike the previous part I just did, actually has the princess and the Duke of Zill. And you'll see why this is a bad thing once we dive into the glittery, badly-animated mushiness that is...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 3!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 2

Part 1 of Felix the Cat: The Movie.

I covered Part 1, so here's Part 2 of this wonderfully insane film known as Felix the Cat: the Movie. So far we've run into magic talking bodily secretions squirted out princessy tear ducts, fish with boobs, friendly swamp-traveling miners that like to talk about intelligent bubbles, and a kingdom that is just totally okay with their ruler disbanding the entire army. Will Part 2 be just as acid-tripping crazy as the first part?

The answer to that question is "Definitely yes", because we're heading into my favorite part. This part has a little bit of everything and is arguably the one part where the script writers temporarily got out of their drunken stupors and wrote something that makes some lick of sense.

Unfortunately, in Felix the Cat: The Movie's universe, the part where the movie starts to make sense is when Felix the Cat has to entertain a giant space lizard's circus while he shares a dorm room with some mice/lizard hybrids and gives stand-up comedy to aliens. This bears repeating. The part where the movie makes sense is at a giant space lizard's circus. It's not too late to bail.

But if you choose to stick around, it's time for...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 2!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 1

Animated films; the form of entertainment that people use when they objectively look at animation.

To the populace, an animated film with a giant budget and a contained story that has to be told in a given amount of time is the best way to present the craft of animation. Animated TV shows could get away with being cheap because they're the soulless byproduct of an industry, but not films. No, no, no. Not with Pixar around who always thinks about the art and never about the money! (although this state of mind is slowly dying out with the advent of Cars 2) And with animation studios constantly competing with each other in order to make the next film that will be as great as Disney or Pixar, animated films have become a profitable business.

At least most of the time, because for every well-made cartoon with a budget over several million dollars, there are probably like five cheaply made movies that were made with a budget that couldn't get you a Happy Meal from McDonalds. These are the movies that are usually forgotten by the wayside. This movie was one of those movies.

Felix the Cat: The Movie was an attempt to revive an aging cartoon icon after years of being nothing more than a seller of merchandise. Their heart was in the right place (unlike Heathcliff who just repackaged episodes from the TV show and shilled it off for a quick buck)...at least until they decided that the best way to revive one of the oldest cartoon characters still in existence today was to ship off the cartoon product to Hungary and then put the movie in theaters to compete with Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, that was smart.

Needless to say, Felix the Cat: The Movie bombed at the box office and wasn't the Felix revival the creators had hoped for. Ironically, Disney, possibly still laughing their asses off at the fact that this movie had the same opening day as the Disney movie that almost won Best Picture in the Oscars, would run this movie a lot on the Disney Channel and that's how most people know of its existence.

That being said, I have a sad confession to make. The reason this is going to be my first animated movie blog post is because this was one of my favorite movies from my childhood and still remains a personal favorite for me. I'm currently going to school for an Animation BFA so I know bad animation when I see it, and unfortunately, even though this animation is from an outsourced Hungarian studio, there's admittingly a bizarre charm to it that I can still deprive some entertainment from.

That doesn't change the fact it's a strange as hell movie, though, so into the grinder it goes.

Since I blab so much about only 22 minute episodes, I'm splitting this analysis into multiple parts. So sit back and gaze into the strangely animated abyss that is...

Felix the Cat: The Movie