The title of this Felix toon is 'Woos Whoopee', which makes sense if you view a print with the original credits. Since Felix received star billing -- his name above the title -- the credits manage to read 'Felix the Cat Woos Whoopee'. At this time, Felix the Cat was indeed a hugely popular box-office draw, fully deserving of star billing. Too bad he couldn't keep up with a certain mouse from a competing studio.
As another reviewer has already noted, there's a Mrs Felix in this cartoon: a white cat. I find it a bit confusing when a cartoon character in a long-running series will acquire a wife or children (or both) to serve the plot of one particular toon, only for these relations to vanish without a trace afterward.
This American cartoon was produced and released during Prohibition, so domestic audiences undoubtedly were highly amused by the sequences of Felix boozing it up with his cronies in some speakeasy. (Can a silent film have a speakeasy?) Also, there's some clever animation in the depictions of the monsters Felix sees in the throes of his drunken trip home. One unfortunate trait of American comedy films (toon and live-action) during the Prohibition era was that they got very easy laughs just by mentioning or showing booze, and often the scriptwriters got lazy by relying too heavily on this device. (Like all those 1970s comedies that got cheap laughs from jokes about marijuana.)
One sequence in 'Woos Whoopee' intrigued me very much ... then disappointed me. At one point, Felix moves so close to the camera that the black part of his head fills the entire frame. I expected this to become an 'invisible cut', the cinematic device later used by Hitchcock in 'Rope': the camera would pull back from Felix's black head to reveal that it had actually cut to an entirely different dark object. I was disappointed when this didn't happen, and the black object continued to be Felix. Oh, well...
There are quite a few imaginative visual compositions in this short toon, very cleverly animated on a low budget. I didn't laugh at all during 'Woos Whoopee', but I did enjoy it. My rating: 7 out of 10.
As another reviewer has already noted, there's a Mrs Felix in this cartoon: a white cat. I find it a bit confusing when a cartoon character in a long-running series will acquire a wife or children (or both) to serve the plot of one particular toon, only for these relations to vanish without a trace afterward.
This American cartoon was produced and released during Prohibition, so domestic audiences undoubtedly were highly amused by the sequences of Felix boozing it up with his cronies in some speakeasy. (Can a silent film have a speakeasy?) Also, there's some clever animation in the depictions of the monsters Felix sees in the throes of his drunken trip home. One unfortunate trait of American comedy films (toon and live-action) during the Prohibition era was that they got very easy laughs just by mentioning or showing booze, and often the scriptwriters got lazy by relying too heavily on this device. (Like all those 1970s comedies that got cheap laughs from jokes about marijuana.)
One sequence in 'Woos Whoopee' intrigued me very much ... then disappointed me. At one point, Felix moves so close to the camera that the black part of his head fills the entire frame. I expected this to become an 'invisible cut', the cinematic device later used by Hitchcock in 'Rope': the camera would pull back from Felix's black head to reveal that it had actually cut to an entirely different dark object. I was disappointed when this didn't happen, and the black object continued to be Felix. Oh, well...
There are quite a few imaginative visual compositions in this short toon, very cleverly animated on a low budget. I didn't laugh at all during 'Woos Whoopee', but I did enjoy it. My rating: 7 out of 10.