April Maze

This wasn't up to the quality of the Otto Messmer years of Felix The Cat, from the early 1920s, so inexperience in this animation genre was no excuse for making a lousy Felix The Cat cartoon like this one. This is a lame effort, even for 1930.

I wondered if this wasn't going to be a lemon right off the bat when they held the opening title page on screen for 20 seconds without a change. It turned to be a forbearer of things to come.

I've never a cartoon before where they held scenes for so long as they do in spots here. We see dancing bears, or a tree or a crow on a telephone wire go on and on and on. It makes for something rare: a boring cartoon that seems to go on forever.

It's difficult to be too hard on any silent cartoons, but by this stage they'd been making Felix cartoons for years, and had made much better ones than this six or seven years earlier. Basically by this stage Felix was going off the boil. You can forgive a lot, but there's really no excuse for poor comic timing, and in this short, scenes and shots which are supposed to be amusing are allowed to drag on interminably, way past the point that any comic potential is exhausted. It doesn't help that the story is pretty uninteresting either; the attempt to have a picnic in fickle autumn weather. Chase this one down only if you're a completist. Most likely you'll find it on a disc containing other much superior Felix shorts.

Felix the Cat and his kids (kids?!) try to go for a picnic. However, all sorts of problems occur and they never get to enjoy their day.

During the 1920s, some of the very best cartoons available were Felix the Cat. While the animation style was only fair, its competition was no better. However, the cartoons were hilarious--so funny that when you watch them today, you can't help but laugh. When I tried to watch "April Maze", I was shocked--it was like I was watching an entirely different cartoon character. Gone was all the humor and in its place was a glacial pace, animation quality that had fallen way behind the times and a pointlessness I found shocking. I even tried increasing the frame rate (i.e., my viewer on Windows will let me double the speed of a film if I want) and it STILL dragged. Too often, characters and the opening titles seemed to be going at a snail's pace! Overall, a very frustrating film. It was silent during a time when all the other films had switched to sound, featured bad animation and a script that was shockingly disjoint and unfunny. Avoid at all costs--and I can see why Felix went from the most popular cartoon character to a has-been by the 1930s!