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

Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island - Master of Disaster

Ooooh boy, where do I begin with this show?

I remember first learning about this show when I happened to flip through the channels while me and my family were staying in Maui. I saw an episode that involved bananas obtaining Thanksgiving vision and shooting cooked turkeys out of their eyes in order to battle a sentient blender, and by the time the episode was over, I immediately wondered if the TV was just giving us a taste of what it's like to be on LSD. I had written the show off as maybe some sort of fever dream and went along with my life pretending that this didn't exist.

But I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

It's Coconutbob Swimwearpants!

Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island is another cartoon that escaped the public's notice. It had 2 seasons and 13 episodes and then was quietly cancelled without so much of an audience to speak of. The show didn't get killed so much as quietly whimper and choke on its own vomit. The only reason I've seen people bring it up is because of two reasons.

1. It's a shameless ripoff of Spongebob Squarepants, with Rob Paulsen even saying so in an interview.
and
2. In an episode, a sentient piece of fruit dresses up as Sephiroth. I know this sounds silly, but this was a huge defining moment of this cartoon. I looked up this show's Wikipedia article and 80% of the article is going on and on about how an episode referenced so many different pieces from Final Fantasy 7, so much that a part of everyone's character profile is what video game character they dressed up as in that faithful episode. Square-Enix fans will support anything that even mentions the words "Midgar" or "Cloud Strife" and this is no exception.

As much as I want to take on the fateful episode where Coconut Fred dresses up like Cloud Strife, making several thousand Square fans go "KAWAII NO DESU NE!" and soil their pants in delight, I kind of want to hit the first episode first just to see what kind of maniacal piece of animation I'm subjecting myself to, especially after watching Spliced. The episodes are divided into 11 minute segments, but believe me, that's all I can probably manage of this show at a time. I'll either end up dead or craving like several thousand tons of fruit salad if I take on a full 22 minute episode. You don't want me to eat myself into a cherry and orange-induced coma, now do you?

I'm going with Master of Disaster since Coconut Fred's show has a freaking huge title (what, was "Fruit Salad Island" by itself already taken?) and Master of Disaster has the shorter title of the two 11 minute segments.

So yeah, Master of Disaster. How fitting.

Master of Disaster

Spliced - Stuck Together

You know, I've been talking about some pretty old shows recently. Shows that are almost 20 years old, with one cartoon even being older than I am. Shows that, if I keep talking about the 80's and 90's, might alienate my nonexistent audience into thinking that I some sort of bias towards this period of animation. (I do, but that's not what's being discussed here.)

So you know what? I'm going to cover a show that's only two years old.

You'd think with the advent of the Internet, less shows would escape notice. You'd think with more people coming out of the "I like cartoons and I'm over 18!" closet on the Internet, no animated series would be left unturned. Unfortunately, a lot of shows do, leading several people to believe that there just aren't as many cartoons as there were in the 90's. (which is actually sort of true, but still) You'd be surprised, but there are actually quite a few modern shows that ended up just like Creepy Crawlers; they surface, have a couple episodes, and then sink back into the mud pool of obscurity in which they were birthed from.

One such show is Spliced, a Teletoon cartoon that was barely even in the United States. Considering that at one point in time Teletoon cartoons had infested Cartoon Network like a bad infestation of fleas (remember Stoked, 6Teen, and those Total Drama shows that all looked exactly the same? I mean those), I'm actually rather surprised that Cartoon Network did NOT pick up the Teletoon show that wasn't produced by the same company. But then again, these are the same people who greenlit Problem Solverz and yet refused to renew Megas XLR, Robotomy, and Sym-bionic Titan so I have reason to believe that whoever runs Cartoon Network decided that brains weren't hipster and random enough and had them surgically removed.

Otherwise I'm going to have to come to grips that some person, who thinks and breathes just like you and I, thought that CN Real was a mighty good idea and would totally enhance the network.

It wasn't and it didn't.

But before I get off-topic again (I can rant about Disney Channel in another entry just to make it fair), what is Spliced actually about? Basically a mad scientist splices together a bunch of animals and made a bunch of horrific mutants until he was carted off to jail. So now the mutated animals, without the mad scientist running their lives, built their own society and go on wacky hijinks in the scientists' abandoned equipment. If you ever played any of the Crash Bandicoot games or watched the show "The Wuzzles", this premise will seem kind of familiar.

What has science done!?

Also the intro is extremely catchy AND manages to sneak in the word "crap". Any cartoon intro that manages to do that and not get yelled at wins brownie points in my book.

I figure the best way to look at this show is the first episode, and since this show is like Heathcliff in that it's divided into 11 minute segments, I'll look at the second segment of the first episode. Why the second segment? Because it introduces more of the characters than the first one and because I personally liked it better than the first segment. My cartoon blog, my rules.

Anyways, I present you a cartoon where one of the main characters has a giant udder for feet, a cartoon that goes from charming buddy adventure to a survival horror. I give you...

Stuck Together