They got pretty outrageous once sound cartoons rolled around, but here’s a pretty tame one from the silent Felix the Cat short Two-Lip Time (1926). Felix accidentally knocks a pint of gin into a watering can then waters some flowers and what looks like a tree stump. The flowers want more. One tulip drinks from a puddle and then smacks its lips. The tree staggers around and falls over. It’s all pretty innocent but amusing.
There are never any animation credits on these silent Felixes. Maybe it’s in over-compensation for years of Pat Sullivan getting credit for Felix, but today you get the impression that Otto Messmer was responsible for all these silent shorts after Bill Nolan left. But there was a team of people who animated them and it’d be nice to match an animator to a specific cartoon.
A photograph of the post-Nolan studio shows, in addition to Sullivan and Messmer, Raoul Barre, Dana Parker, Harold Walker, Al Eugster, Jack Bogle, George Canata, Tom Byrne, and an unknown artist. Any of those gentlemen might have worked on this cartoon.
ReplyDeleteRudy Zamora and Burt Gillett also
DeleteAlthough, Gillett and Zamora didn't find work at this studio until 1927 and this cartoon was released in 1926 so yea
DeleteI understand from Tom Stathes that Raoul Barre worked on this particular part of the cartoon.
ReplyDeleteHe also animated a Chicken in one of the 1927 shorts I believe
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