Felix Finds Out (1924)
Article 5822 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-2-2020
Directed by Otto Messmer
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Felix the Cat cartoon

Felix’s human friend is given a homework assignment to tell what makes the moon shine. Felix finds out.

Early Felix the Cat cartoons, like Tex Avery cartoons, flirt with unreality so pervasively that one is tempted to include them all in this survey, but I do tend to hold out for some more precise fantastic content. This one has hot dogs that act like dogs, the moon almost crashing to the Earth (Felix calls out to the Man in the Moon, which comes fairly close to Earth at that point), and in the (inevitable) scene where Felix has an encounter with a mug of moonshine, he hallucinates some very bizarre creatures. That’s enough content for me. The Felix the Cat cartoons are some of my favorites from the silent era, and though this isn’t quite as wild as some others, it’s still quite amusing, especially during the hallucination sequence. This one is worth a gander.