Directed by: Otto Messmer

Starring: Felix the Cat, Willie Brown, the Nifty Nine, Jupiter Pluvius

STORY

Before there were talking mice, wisecracking rabbits or Saturday morning cartoons, there was a mischievous black cat named Felix.

And in Felix Saves the Day, Felix has a baseball game to rescue.

Felix is playing ball with his young friend Willie Brown and the neighborhood boys when their innocent game attracts the attention of a policeman. Things rapidly get out of hand, as they usually do whenever Felix is nearby, and Willie winds up in jail.

That's a particularly serious problem because Willie is an important member of the Nifty Nine, who have a big baseball game to play at the Polo Grounds.

Without Willie, things aren't looking good.

Felix isn't about to abandon his friend or his team.

First he has to figure out what's happening at the game. Then he has to reach the ballpark. And finally, Felix must somehow find a way to turn things around.

Fortunately, Felix has something more valuable than muscles.

He has an imagination.

The little black cat thinks, schemes and improvises his way through the city, eventually arriving at the Polo Grounds, where the Nifty Nine desperately need help.

And Felix comes up with a solution that only a cartoon character could devise.

He sends a baseball soaring impossibly high into the heavens, where it reaches Jupiter Pluvius, the ancient personification of rain.

Soon the skies open.

The baseball game is rained out.

The Nifty Nine are saved from defeat.

And Felix has, quite literally, saved the day.

But the plot is only part of the fun.

Felix Saves the Day gives us a glimpse of animation while the art form was still discovering what it could become. Drawn characters interact with photographic and live-action imagery. Felix can manipulate his surroundings, defy physics and turn an ordinary problem into a surreal visual solution.

More than a century later, that's the real joy of watching Felix.

His world doesn't have to make sense.

It only has to make Felix sense.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
BEFORE MICKEY, THERE WAS FELIX

Felix the Cat became one of animation's earliest internationally recognized cartoon stars.

His simple black body, enormous white eyes and expressive movements made him ideally suited to the visual language of silent film. Felix didn't need dialogue to communicate with an audience.

He could think.

He could worry.

He could scheme.

And most importantly, audiences could see him doing it.

OTTO MESSMER BEHIND THE CAT

Felix Saves the Day was directed and animated by Otto Messmer, with Pat Sullivan producing.

The history of Felix's creation has generated decades of discussion because Sullivan's name originally received public credit while Messmer did much of the character's defining creative and animation work.

Whatever appeared on the business paperwork, Messmer's contribution to the screen personality and animation of Felix became fundamental to the character audiences loved.

A NEW DISTRIBUTION ERA FOR FELIX

Felix Saves the Day occupies an especially interesting place in Felix history.

After Pat Sullivan's previous arrangement with Paramount ended, distributor Margaret J. Winkler began handling Felix.

Animation historian Michael Barrier identifies Felix Saves the Day as the first free-standing Felix cartoon released under the new arrangement in February 1922.

That makes this little baseball adventure more than another Felix short.

It marks the beginning of an important new chapter in the cat's screen career.

A WOMAN HELPED PUT FELIX ON SCREENS

M. J. Winkler was Margaret J. Winkler, one of the pioneering distributors of early animation.

At a time when the developing animation business was overwhelmingly male, Winkler became an important figure in getting animated films into theaters.

Her distribution operation would become associated not only with Felix but with another young animation producer whose work she agreed to distribute:

Walt Disney.

That's quite a piece of animation history hiding behind those initials — M. J. Winkler.

BASEBALL AT THE POLO GROUNDS

The movie takes Felix and his friends to one of America's legendary sporting venues: the Polo Grounds in New York City.

The Polo Grounds name was used for a succession of stadiums in Upper Manhattan and became famously associated with the New York Giants baseball team.

For a little 1922 cartoon to place its action there immediately gave contemporary audiences a recognizable big-league setting.

Felix wasn't just playing neighborhood baseball anymore.

He had reached the big time.

CARTOON MEETS THE REAL WORLD

One of the most fascinating visual features of Felix Saves the Day is its combination of animation with photographic and live-action material.

Real images of buildings, transportation and crowds appear alongside the animated characters.

TCM specifically notes the film's combination of animation, still photography and live-action footage of actual baseball spectators.

Nearly a century before digital filmmakers routinely combined imaginary characters with real environments, Felix was already crossing that boundary.

FELIX THINKS

One of the great characteristics of Felix is that we can practically watch his brain working.

When confronted with a problem, Felix paces.

He pauses.

He thinks.

Then an idea arrives.

This visual problem-solving became central to Felix's screen personality. Instead of merely having things happen to him, Felix frequently studies his predicament and invents his own wonderfully impossible solution.

In Felix Saves the Day, the baseball game becomes another puzzle for Felix to solve.

AINTOID: JUPITER PLUVIUS TO THE RESCUE

Who do you call when your baseball team is losing?

Apparently...

Jupiter Pluvius.

The expression comes from the Roman god Jupiter in his rain-bringing capacity.

Felix's solution is wonderfully absurd: if his team can't win the game, perhaps he can make sure nobody finishes it.

Rain does the rest.

AINTOID: A CARTOON WITH A REAL BASEBALL CROWD

Look carefully at the ballpark sequences.

Those aren't all drawings.

The filmmakers incorporate actual crowd imagery into the cartoon, creating an unusual visual collision between Felix's drawn universe and recognizable reality.

For audiences watching today, those moments are almost little windows into 1922.

AINTOID: ONE REEL OF FELIX

Felix Saves the Day was originally a one-reel, black-and-white silent cartoon.

Silent Era records its surviving 35mm print at 705 feet.

That's a remarkably small physical package for a cartoon that now carries more than a century of animation history.

AINTOID: FELIX SURVIVES!

Here's something we LOVE at Absolutely Classics:

The film survives.

Silent Era documents a print preserved in the Library of Congress, within the AFI/Louis Bosso Collection.

Another surviving print is held by the Cinémathèque québécoise.

So when we watch Felix Saves the Day more than 100 years after its release, we're benefiting from the preservation of fragile motion-picture history that could very easily have disappeared.

AINTOID: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS THE BALLGAME

The Library of Congress baseball-film holdings identify Felix Saves the Day as a 1922 Pat Sullivan Studio production directed by Otto Messmer.

Its catalog description even preserves the basic premise: Willie is jailed, the Nifty Nine fall behind at the Polo Grounds, and Felix has to find a way to save them.

Felix didn't merely survive in collectors' memories.

He made it into one of America's great film archives.

AINTOID: FELIX IS PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES

Silent Era lists Felix Saves the Day as public domain in the United States.

That means this little cat's 1922 baseball adventure belongs to an extraordinary surviving body of early American animation that modern audiences can continue to discover, preserve and celebrate.

THE FILM ALSO SHOWS ITS AGE

There is an element modern viewers should understand before watching.

The opposing baseball team is depicted using racial caricatures of Black characters typical of some American cartoons of the period.

Those images are offensive by modern standards.

AIN presents historic films as artifacts of the eras in which they were created. Preserving a film does not require pretending that every part of its history is comfortable.

In fact, seeing the work honestly allows us to recognize both what early filmmakers accomplished and where the culture that produced those films fell painfully short.

AINTOID: MEL BLANC REMEMBERED FELIX

There is a wonderful connection to another generation of animation.

Legendary voice performer Mel Blanc, later famous as the voice behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and many other Warner Bros. characters, recalled Felix Saves the Day as the earliest cartoon he could remember seeing.

Imagine that lineage:

A young boy watches Felix.

That boy grows up.

And his voice eventually becomes part of animation history itself.

FELIX WAS ALREADY SHOWING WHAT CARTOONS COULD DO

That's perhaps the greatest backstage secret of all.

Felix doesn't have to obey reality.

Need to reach somewhere impossible?

Felix finds a way.

Need to transform an object?

Felix can do it.

Need to stop a baseball game?

Send the ball into the heavens and get the rain god involved.

The great breakthrough of animated cartoons wasn't simply making drawings move.

It was realizing that drawings could do anything.

Felix the Cat helped teach audiences that lesson.

And in Felix Saves the Day, Felix doesn't merely save a baseball game.

He gives us another surviving glimpse of animation learning how to become animation.