Felix the cat as modern trickster

American Art

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 65-87

  Tom, Patricia Vettel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449120366     PISSN: 10739300     EISSN: 15496503     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/424259     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Three of the theorists I invoke-Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin-are among those whom John Fiske characterizes as the five "anchors" of popular culture theory, the others being Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall. See the preface to Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routlege, 1991), pp. ix-xi
2. Creighton Peet, "The Cartoon Comedy," New Republic59 (14 August 1929): 341-42
3. The most comprehensive history of the Felix phenomenon is John Canemaker, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991)
4. See also Donald Crafton, "Felix; or, Feline Felicity," in Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1982), pp. 300-349
5. John Canemaker, Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat (New York: Phoenix Films and Video, 1977), filmstrip; John Canemaker, "Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat," Millimeter (September 1976): 32-36, 58-61
6. and Julian Fox, "Felix Remembered," Films and Filming 21 (November 1974): 44-51. Current sources for Felix films include Budget Films of Los Angeles;
7. Em Gee Film Library of Reseda, Calif.; Video Yesteryear of Sandy Hook, Conn.; and Facets of Chicago. Filmographies are included in Jeff Lenburg, The Encylcopedia of Animated Cartoons (New York: Facts on File, 1991), 26-27
8. and Canemaker, Felix: The Twisted Tale, pp. 169-74
9. Messmer received little public recognition for his role in the creation and production of the Felix films during the 1920s; Sullivan was given full credit in Dress releases. However, Dana Parker who joined the Pat Sullivan Studio as an animator in 1927, cites Messmer as the "idea man" in "Making Comic Cartoons Move: A Peep into the Busy Studio of One Famous Animator of Humorous Drawings," Theater Magazine 47 (January 1928): 32. Messmer did not begin to receive public acknowledgment for his contributions until the late 1950s, garnering even more acclaim with back-to-back retrospecrives of Felix the Cat at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Messmer's story was finally told before his death in 1983 in a series of interviews with Donald Crafton and John Canemaker
10. Koko the Clown, the star of "Out of the Inkwell," made his first appearance in 1919. This series included both live-action and animation, each film centering on the relationship between animator and his animated creations. See Crafton, pp. 169-77
11. See Donald Crafton, "Animation Iconography: The 'Hand of the Artist'" Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (Fall 1979): 409-28
12. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 127
13. For historical connotations and representations of the cat, see Kenneth Clark, Animals and Men: Their Relationship As Reflected in Western Art from Prehistory to the Present Day (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1977);
14. Francis Donald Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971)
15. and Anne Marks, The Cat in History, Legend, and Art (London: E. Stock, 1909).
16. For the use of the black cat as a symbol of sabotage, see Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I. W. W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), pp. 59-64
17. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), pp. 93-103
18. See Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 152-53- In addition to psychoanalytic theory, Perrett also credits the scientific legitimation of the notion of "sexual freedom" in the 1920s to anthropological studies
19. and Crafton, Before Mickey, pp. 317-18
20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 26
21. and Cristiano Grottanelli, "Tricksters, Scapegoats, Champions, Saviors," History of Religions 23, no. 2 (1983): 120
22. See Grottanelli, pp. 117-120
23. In "Absurdity and Hidden Truth: Cunning Intelligence and Grotesque Body Images as Manifestations of the Trickster," History of Religions 24, no. 3 (1985): 220, Klaus-Peter Koepping emphasizes that although each trickster is "culturally ordered," there is "an almost universal sameness in body imagery, for all must play on the same basic body."16
24. Koepping, p. 200
25. On resolutions governing moral standards as set by the motion picture industry during the 1920s, see Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), pp. 465-67
26. For example, the Winnebago trickster, Wakdjunkaga, carried his long, coiled penis in a box; see Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, with commentaries by Karl Kerény¡ and C. G. Jung (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955), pp. 3-60, for the complete trickster cycle of this figure
27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloom¡ngton: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 317
28. Bakhtin, pp. 8, 92, 121, 94
29. Karl Kerény¡, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology," in Radin, p. 185. Bakhtin analyzed medieval festivals through the writings of Francois Rabelais
30. Kerényi, p. 185
31. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; reprint, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986).
32. To this trio of characters could be added the "confidence man," as discussed by Kenneth S. Lynn in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1959), pp. 77-86, 99
33. This fear of the machine as a threat to humanity, including the fear that automation was replacing human labor, reached its peak with the onset of the Depression in 1929, when industrialization and technology were blamed for the massive unemployment. See William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 149-70. The anxiety induced by living in a mechanized environment is revealed in John and Ruth Vassos, Ultimo (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1930), which presents a world in which machines control humanity; and in John Vassos, Phobia (New York: Covici, Friede, 1931), in which Vassos refers to "mechanophobia," the "fear of machinery," as the "mental disease of our own times" (pp. 61-63)
34. De Certeau, pp. 18, 31, xii
35. The stigma attached to art forms with a popular audience is exemplified by the criticism of Clement Greenberg, who set out to preserve "high art," marketed for an elite audience, from what he considered "kitsch," a category in which he included comics and Hollywood movies. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Partisan Review 6 (fall 1939): 34-49. Resistance to the serious consideration of animation within art history is probably also due to its collaborative production, its comic nature, and its characterization as a medium for children