RetroClips

Feline Follies is the film where Felix the Cat effectively began, released under the name Master Tom a year before the character was rebranded and became one of the first cartoon characters to achieve real global fame, predating Mickey Mouse by nearly a decade. Animator Otto Messmer worked under producer Pat Sullivan's name, a common arrangement in the era's animation studios, and it would be decades before Messmer's authorship of Felix was widely credited. The character's rubbery, expressive movement style set the template for cartoon animals that Disney and others would build on through the rest of the silent era.