Felix the Cat was once box office heaven, but his creator left a dark legacy

If parallel universes exist, then it's very possible that in one of them, the dominant cartoon animal isn't a mouse named Mickey, but a cat named Felix. In this parallel universe, the founder of one of the world's largest entertainment companies wouldn't be Walt Disney, but Pat Sullivan, the son of a Sydney taxi driver and the creator of Felix the Cat.

A century ago, Felix the Cat was a sensation in the film world, ranking alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and bringing his creator a fortune. His success was so great that Walt Disney actually used him as a template for creating the cartoon character that still earns Disney millions of dollars annually. However, while characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck remain household names, Felix the Cat has largely faded into obscurity, a fact that some entertainment historians attribute to a combination of stubbornness, complacency, and tragedy.

The dark legacy of his creator, Pat Sullivan, is that of a man convicted of child rape, an alcoholic, and now almost unknown outside of animation history. Pat Sullivan achieved success with Felix the Cat, the most popular animated character of the 1920s. Born in Sydney to Irish immigrant parents who made a living driving horse-drawn taxis, Sullivan did not come from wealth, but he certainly experienced it later in life.

As a teenager, Sullivan drew cartoons for The Worker newspaper before moving to London, where he eked out a living as an illustrator. He slept rough by the Thames and also tried his hand at boxing and juggling, none of which brought him much success. Sullivan spent what little money he earned on alcohol, which may have inadvertently led to one of the best moves of his life. According to Sullivan's recollections years later in the Sydney Mail, he was drunk and passed out while seeing a friend off on a freighter. When he woke up, the ship was at sea, heading to New York. This wasn't the first time Sullivan's life was altered by alcohol, and it wouldn't be the last.

In the United States, Sullivan joined a cartoon studio run by Canadian animator Raoul Barré, but was fired less than a year later. He started his own small animation studio, producing cartoons including animated versions of Charlie Chaplin shorts. Sullivan's timing couldn't have been better. Animated films were rapidly gaining popularity, and he was perfectly positioned to capitalize on the trend. However, trouble was brewing. In 1917, Sullivan met the love of his life, vaudeville performer Marjorie Gallagher, but before the pair could marry, the Australian cartoonist was arrested.

Sullivan was accused of unlawful imprisonment and raping a 14-year-old girl. The court records of the case, held at the Municipal Library in New York City, make for grim and sordid reading. Sullivan, then in his early 30s, plied the minor with alcohol at his New York apartment before raping her. A female colleague, concerned that Sullivan may have infected the girl with a venereal disease, reported him to the police. Sullivan pleaded not guilty but was ultimately convicted. This should have been the end of his career and his romance, but somehow, both flourished. Astonishingly, the case was not reported in the newspapers, despite Sullivan being a rising star in the entertainment world at the time.

His wife, Marjorie, stood by him. The pair became engaged weeks after Sullivan's arrest, and Marjorie even wrote a letter to the judge in the case, asking for leniency. Her words may have had some effect, as Sullivan was sentenced to less than a year in prison for a crime that could have carried a maximum sentence of 10 years. Straight out of prison, Sullivan went back to work. He seemed to suffer no career setbacks for being a convicted child rapist. In late 1917, his studio released the animated short, Thomas Cat’s Tail, to moderate success. Two years later, the character now known as “Tom the Master” returned in Feline Follies.

In his second screen appearance, Tom pursues a female cat only to discover she has a litter of kittens. When Tom discovers this, he chooses to commit suicide. Clearly, things were different back then. Less than a month later, Tom returned as "Felix," and the rest, as they say, is history. Felix the Cat was a massive hit, appearing in dozens of films over the next decade and becoming one of the biggest draws at movie theaters. Looking back at these films from 100 years ago, they appear simple, even crude. They also reflect the prejudiced attitudes of the time, including racist caricatures of African Americans.

Sullivan was accused years later of bias in his hiring policies, with illustrator Rudy Zamora claiming that Sullivan refused to hire African-American artists. However, it is easy to forget that these films were groundbreaking in their own way. Here was a cat that behaved like a human, engaging audiences with whimsical, and sometimes surreal, stories that blended comedy and fantasy in a way that had never been seen before. Australian cartoonist and historian Lindsay Foyle says Felix was completely original. “Sullivan created a cat that walked on two legs instead of four,” he says. “I think Thomas Cat and Felix were the first animated films to use animals as central characters, something that Disney copied very well.”

Felix’s image was emblazoned on the plane of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Felix had a host of celebrity admirers, from famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and playwright George Bernard Shaw to Charlie Chaplin himself. Despite his many flaws, Sullivan knew how to exploit his cash cow, claiming sole creation of Felix, while most of the creative work on the films was done by the animators he employed. One of these was Otto Messmer, who claimed years later that he created Felix single-handedly, although Sullivan had copyrighted his initial animated cat years before Messmer was involved.

In an interview with writer John Canemaker in 1977, Messmer claimed he was the driving force behind Felix the Cat’s success. “Very few people got credit back then. Most people in the industry knew that I was running the studio for him, but all the public knew was ‘A Sullivan Production’,” he says in the documentary, Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat. “I came up with most of the gags.” Ultimately, it was Sullivan’s studio, and most of the financial rewards from Felix’s success went to him. Sullivan reportedly made a fortune from merchandising alone, with the cartoon cat’s image appearing on everything from pottery to postcards. In 1924, Felix the Cat dolls reportedly outsold teddy bears in the UK.

Felix’s box office appeal was not lost on, among others, a young animator named Walt Disney, who started his own studio, modeled on Sullivan’s, with funding from producer Margaret Winkler. Winkler also distributed Sullivan’s Felix the Cat films. One of Disney’s earliest cartoon characters was – you guessed it – a black and white cat that walked on two legs and got into all sorts of trouble. Disney called him Julius the Cat. Sullivan was furious. He terminated his contract with Winkler and found a new distributor for Felix. But Julius the Cat couldn’t dislodge Felix from his throne as the undisputed king of the screen. That wouldn’t happen until Walt Disney created another black and white cartoon animal that walked on two legs and got into all sorts of trouble, and whose name was Mickey.

Felix the Cat may have been a massive success, but Sullivan’s personal life remained a disaster. Animator Harold Walker, who worked for Sullivan, spoke candidly about his boss in John Canemaker’s book, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat. “Pat was a drunk and a sex maniac. He put up some money to finance a madam to open up a place in a prominent hotel in New York City, and had a stable of women,” he says. “Naturally, the result of that was he got a very bad case of syphilis, which he then gave to his wife Marjorie.”

According to Messmer, Sullivan’s drinking problem was also severe, and he became less and less involved in the studio’s work. “He was having an easy time with his chauffeur and his car. We hardly ever saw him,” he says. Sullivan was also caught out by the arrival of sound in films and was beaten to the punch by Disney’s Steamboat Willie, starring the then-newcomer Mickey Mouse. In Steamboat Willie, Mickey is seen grabbing the tail of a black and white cat that looks suspiciously like Felix, spinning it around a few times and then throwing it out the door. Whether it was intentional or not, it summed up Sullivan’s situation, as he was suddenly behind the times. “The problem with Sullivan was that he was successful, and he didn’t want to upset the structure he had,” says Lindsay Foyle. “Sullivan continued to make silent films until around 1932, when he agreed to put sound into Felix films.”

Messmer says he and the other animators working for Sullivan begged him to try something new, but he refused. “We suggested many times that he expand, you know, the market was there. But he said ‘Why change? It’s doing fine now’ and that was his attitude, and that’s why we didn’t get into sound or color or anything,” he says. By the 1930s, Disney had overtaken Sullivan’s studio to become the leader in the animation market, and things went from bad to worse. If the relationship between Sullivan and Marjorie was strained by Sullivan’s alcoholism, his conviction as a rapist, or his reported transmission of syphilis to his wife, it was hard to tell from the outside.

They frequently appeared in newspapers as a happy couple, traveling the world and enjoying the success of Felix the Cat. In February 1932, Marjorie Sullivan fell to her death from the balcony of the couple’s New York apartment. She had been dropped off at the building by her driver, and reportedly fell when she leaned on the balcony to wave goodbye to them. According to Canemaker’s book, Marjorie Sullivan’s death certificate stated she “fell or jumped to the ground from her residence.” Sullivan was reportedly devastated. “That kind of broke him up, and it didn’t help his drinking problem. So we hardly saw him around the studio,” says Messmer.

Sullivan’s mental and physical health rapidly declined due to a combination of alcoholism, grief, and syphilis. In 1933, Sullivan signed a deal to make new Felix the Cat films with sound, but he died weeks after signing the agreement, aged 47. Newspapers reported his cause of death as pneumonia. Sullivan’s death left his animation studio in disarray, with no succession plan and widespread confusion about who actually owned the copyright to Felix the Cat. By the time this was sorted out, Disney had cemented its position as the undisputed king of animation, and Mickey Mouse reigned supreme at the box office.

Felix was resurrected in the 1950s with a television cartoon, but it never achieved the success and fame it had enjoyed in the 1920s. A Felix the Cat movie in 1989 flopped, with one reviewer saying it was “more likely to bury the lovable Felix beyond resurrection than to inspire a new fan base.” DreamWorks Animation bought the rights to Felix in 2014 but doesn’t appear to have any major plans for the cartoon cat. A new comic book starring Felix was released in 2023, but that’s about all there is for the cat who was once king of the box office.