Felix the Cat: The Movie

Felix made his screen debut as an animated short in 1919, passing through newspaper strips to become a major TV star in the '50s and '60s. Unfortunately, updating him for today's kids seems to mean ripping off Star Wars. A beautiful princess sends off a hologrammatic plea for help when she is captured and relieved of her kingdom by an evil duke. There follows a Quest through an alternative dimension inhabited by all manner of hybrid creatures (beasts with detachable heads, carnivorous marsh gas, rampaging robots), in which Felix fills in for Luke Skywalker (with the same combination of wide-eyed innocence and happy-go-lucky optimism that set him apart from more scurrilous cartoon cats like Sylvester, Top Cat and Fritz). Felix always had a surrealist slant, but this inane fantasy lacks the motor of good plot or dialogue. True, the animation is consistently inventive and the voicing good, but the end result is a TV cartoon padded out to feature length.