It is a matter of some dispute whether Felix was created by Sullivan or his top animator Otto Messmer. Ed was third." When Zamora complained about this to Parker, he was told, "The old man (Sullivan) didn’t want any black guys." Involvement in the creation of Felix the Cat Then they would have hired this black guy and myself. Zamora recalled that animator Dana Parker "took the black boy and told him that they’ll call him when they needed him, not hiring anyone that day. According to Rudy Zamora, when he and Eddie Salter tested for positions at the Sullivan studio, they were bested by a young African American boy. Sullivan reportedly carried a strong bias against African Americans. He spent 9 months and 3 days in prison, during which time his studio went on hiatus. In 1917, Sullivan was convicted of rape in the second degree of a 14-year-old girl. Roscoe Arbuckle holding Lasky Studio cat "Ethel" as model for Pat Sullivan to draw his Felix the Cat for the Paramount Magazine, on page 78 of the 12 March 1921 Exhibitors Herald.Ĭontroversies Rape conviction (At the time, newspapers attributed his death to only pneumonia.) He is buried in Cathedral Cemetery in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sullivan died on 15 February 1933 in New York City at age 47 from health problems brought on by alcoholism and pneumonia. In later years, much of Sullivan's staff was interviewed and claimed Messmer deserved all credit for the Felix character's creation and development, arguing that Sullivan was too sick to contribute or even really run the studio. According to Otto Messmer, Sullivan drank all day long and was never in a sound enough state of mind to contribute creatively to the cartoons he produced. According to Shamus Culhane, Sullivan artist Al Eugster recalled that Sullivan was "he most consistent man in the business-consistent in that he was never sober". According to artist George Cannata, Sulivan would often fire employees in a drunken haze, not remembering the next day, when they would return to work as if nothing had happened. Sullivan relented in 1933, and announced that Felix would return in sound, but died that year before production began.īy the early 1930s, Sullivan's alcoholism had completely consumed him. By 1930, Felix had faded from the screen. Unfortunately, Sullivan did not carefully prepare this process and put sound in cartoons that the studio had already completed. Īs Mickey Mouse was gaining popularity among theatre audiences through sound cartoons by late 1928, Sullivan, after years of refusing to convert Felix to sound, finally agreed to use sound in Felix's cartoons.
#Cartoon animator 4 create character series#
This was followed by a series of shorts starring The Tramp. Sullivan decided to start his own studio and made a series called 'Sammy Johnsin' based on a Marriner strip on which he had worked. In 1916, William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, set up a studio to produce animated cartoons based on his paper's strips and hired Barre's best animators. In 1915, Sullivan was fired by Barre for general incompetence. When Marriner died in 1914, Sullivan joined the new animated cartoon studio set up by Raoul Barré. He worked as assistant to newspaper cartoonist William Marriner and drew four strips of his own. Īround 1909, Sullivan left Australia and spent a few months in London, England, before moving to the United States around 1910.
Sullivan was born in Paddington, New South Wales, the second son of Patrick Sullivan, an immigrant from Ireland and his Sydney-born wife Margaret, née Hayes. Patrick Peter Sullivan (22 February 1885 – 15 February 1933) was an Australian-American cartoonist, pioneer animator, and film producer best known for producing the first Felix the Cat silent cartoons.
0 kommentar(er)
