felixthecat – Animation, Race and Progress

Felix the Cat is one of the most recognised cartoon characters of all time. Felix has often been referred to as the ‘Charley Chaplin’ of cartoon characters: a figure alone in a hostile world, who relies on his own cunning to survive. Unlike most other characters of his time, Felix had a real personality which was expressed predominantly through his actions and movements. Felix was a blackface minstrel both in his design and behaviour: he was a mischievous trickster and his blackness of fur, association with Jazz, and his status as an outsider tied him to black culture. Felix was therefore shaped by, embodied, and perpetuated racial anxieties of the time. Of course, like other blackface minstrels, Felix was still tasked with ‘outwitting the other’ which involved turning against other black-coded characters and creating a hierarchy of blackness based upon how ‘civilised’ a given character was.

There are a couple of Felix the Cat cartoons that depict Felix treating a black character more like an equal: Saves the Day (1922) and Tries for Treasure (1923). These shorts contain the same caricature of a young black boy who stars alongside Felix and becomes his side kick in the latter short. In Felix Saves the Day, the boy is portrayed as a member of the ‘Tar Heels’ – a baseball team. While heavily stereotyped, the Tar Heels are still described quite positively, as “a tough team to be reckoned with”. However, the boy is developed in Tries for Treasure into a Sambo character, embodying subservience through his adherence to Felix’s wishes.

Having a cat portrayed as racially superior to a black boy really demonstrates how black people were considered in greater society at the time: as something inferior to be kept at the margins of white culture. This is a trend that would continue for decades since racist ideologies had been intertwined into the very fabric of animation itself.

Entertainer Josephine Baker performs in blackface in imitation of minstrel performer Johnny Hudgins.

Race has been an important element of animation since its very origins and has remained a core part of it. I want to begin my series of brief blog posts with an establishment of animation’s roots in Blackface Minstrelsy through three images. The leftmost image is of a white man performing blackface minstrelsy: a performance involving a person ‘blacking up’ and performing black stereotypes. Take note of the painted-black skin, white lips, wide eyes, ragged clothes and white gloves. These same features are replicated in the characters in the centre and right: Felix the Cat and Bosko. Their emulation of minstrelsy became the model for all other cartoon characters of this period, with vestigial elements appearing in much later cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny.

The typical animated minstrel character was boisterous and rebellious – traits also rooted in blackface minstrelsy performances. Minstrels frequently interacted with more egregious black stereotypes, such as the: savage African, happy slave, natural musician, the chicken or watermelon eater, the idiot, and the superstitious. What made minstrels different was their slave-like relationship to their creator, and their removal from these strict stereotypes, in turn signalling a more progressive form of blackness while still remaining problematic. The minstrel was a disobedient trickster, acting out against their master and frequently punished for it, linking their implicit blackness to slavery. Other black characters were figures of villainy to be defeated by the minstrel to keep them away from white civilisation, using blackness to combat other black identities.

While some may see this minstrelsy as harmless, in reality:

Even if these cartoons did not directly incite bigotry, they certainly did encourage disrespect for people of African descent and therefore tended to reinforce the justification of the continued colonisation of Africa by Europeans.
N. Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press, 2015), 6. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=JVBmCgAAQBAJ.

Therefore, acknowledging this origin is vital to establishing a history of race in cartoons since it gives context to why characters looked and acted the way they did.

Tag: felixthecat

Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat

The Birth of Animation in Blackface Minstrelsy and Ethnic Humour