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Director: unknown
Release Date: May 27, 1925
Stars: Dawn O’Day (Alice), Julius
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
In ‘Alice’s Egg Plant’ Alice and Julius have a chicken farm, but a Russian spy chicken named ‘Little red Henski’ makes their chicken strike. Clever Alice then organizes a cock fight with a one egg admission fee.
‘Alice’s Egg Plant’ marks Dawn O’Day’s only appearance as Alice. She was supposed to be the second Alice after Virginia Davis, who quit after some arguments about her salary. But Disney’s salary offer proved to be too low for O’Day, as well. The next Alice would be Margie Gay, who would serve as Alice during 1925 and 1926
In ‘Alice’s Egg Plant’ one can already see the transition from emphasis on live action to animation. The shots of Alice are minimized in this cartoon and there are no close ups. The animation on the other hand begins to look more flexible and lifelike. Add the clever and entertaining story with its many gags, and here’s an Alice Comedy that still is entertaining today. It would also be prophetic, because Disney himself would face a frustrating strike in 1941, also led by an agitator from outside the company, Herbert K. Sorrell…
Watch ‘Alice’s Egg Plant’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Alice’s Egg Plant’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities’
Director: unknown
Release Date: December 15, 1925
Stars: Virginia Davis (Alice), Julius
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Alice (Virginia Davis) and her friend Julius the cat are on a safari in the jungle.
The cartoon consists of several unrelated gags: Julius encounters some crocodiles, two elephants go bathing, Julius makes a barber sign post out of a tiger’s tail, and both Alice and Julius are chased by lions (a scene similar to the finale of Alice’s pilot cartoon).
The cartoon contains many surreal gags, a lot of them unashamedly Felix the Cat-like, especially when Julius uses his comic expressions and balloons as tools. Alice’s role, however, is extremely limited here. This is no surprise, for ‘Alice in the Jungle’ is made around leftover footage of Virginia Davis, who, after some salary problems, had been replaced by Margie Gay in early 1925.
Watch ‘Alice in the Jungle’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Alice in the Jungle’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities’
Director: unknown
Release Date: November 1, 1924
Stars: Virginia Davis (Alice)
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Alice is at school singing out of tune and blowing a balloon that contains ink. When it explodes in the teacher’s face, Alice is cornered. There she falls asleep.
Alice dreams she’s making music with a cat, a dog and a donkey, until they are being attacked by a evil horned teacher and three anthropomorphized schoolbooks called ‘reading’, ‘writing’ and ‘arithmetic’. The cat invents a canon to shoot pepper with. The first shot is successful, but the second one explodes in their faces, so Alice and the gang are sneezing their heads off. At that point Alice awakes.
‘Alice Gets in Dutch’ is a rather unremarkable entry in the Alice Comedies series. None of the animation in this short is particularly noteworthy, although the animation of the cat thinking up an invention looks quite good. This cat character would eventually evolve into Alice’s main sidekick, the very Felix the Cat-like Julius. The technique of combining live action and drawings suffers in this short; at some scenes Alice is rendered so light, she’s almost invisible.
Watch ‘Alice Gets In Dutch’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Alice Gets In Dutch’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities’
Director: Walt Disney
Release Date: May 1, 1924
Stars: Virginia Davis (Alice)
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Alice organizes a wild west show for the kids in the neighborhood.
All goes well until the bully Tubby O’Brien and his gang show up. Her fellow actors chicken out, so Alice has to improvise some stories about her experiences in the ‘wild and woolly west’. Enter the cartoon sequence.
In her first story she defeats some Indians. In the second one she’s a sheriff in a saloon, smoking a cigar and attending a bad performance of ‘Sweet Adeline’. Meanwhile, the villain, “Wild Bill Hiccup” tries to steal the safe. He and Alice end up in a gunfight in which every other person in the saloon gets killed. She chases the villain by car, returning the safe in the end.
The gang of bullies is not impressed and they pelt her with vegetables. But Alice chases them all out of her humble theater, beating up Tubby O’Brien herself. The cartoon ends with her triumphant smile.
The live action footage, with the instantly lovable Virginia Davis as Alice and a bunch of local children, is highly entertaining. None of the animation, by Ham Hamilton and Walt Disney himself, is particularly interesting, however. Indeed, two months later, Disney would quit animating himself, leaving that to his more skilled employees, like Ub Iwerks.
Watch ‘Alice’s Wild West Show’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Alice’s Wild West Show’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities’
Director: Walt Disney
Production Date: 1923
Stars: Virginia Davis (Alice), Walt Disney, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Ub Iwerks, Carman Maxwell
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘Alice’s Wonderland’ is the pilot film for the Alice cartoons, which Disney made in Kansas city, before trying his luck in Hollywood.
The title card of this pilot reads: “Scenario and direction by Walt Disney. Photography by Ubbe Iwerks and Rudolf Ising. Technical direction by Hugh Harman and Carman Maxwell.”
Alice (the four year old Virginia Davis) drops by the studio and tells Walt Disney she likes to watch him drawing some funnies. Walt Disney lacks his familiar mustache in this sequence, but he is already the kind entertainer of children here, and he takes her to a sheet of paper on where a cat chases a dog out of a dog house. The rest of the studio is also populated by animators (Iwerks, Harman, Ising and Maxwell all appear in this cartoon) and toons alike. The whole crew ‘s watching a boxing match between a dog and a cat, for example.
That night Alice dreams she arrives in cartoonland by train. She’s welcomed by animals and she performs a little dance for them. Unfortunately four lions break out of Cartoonland Zoo and they chase her into a tree, into a cave, into a rabbit hole and finally, to a cliff. She falls off the cliff, and then she awakes.
This cartoon is very entertaining. The idea of a girl in a cartoon (the inverse of the idea of Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell, a series that was around for eight years by then) works wonderfully, and the cartoon is lively. It already contains lots of music and dance, and a very rubbery animated train, besides the normal stiff animation you find in most cartoons of the twenties. The animation of the train looks forward to the flexible animation style that would later make Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney famous.
Luckily, Disney was able to sell the Alice series, starting his Hollywood career. His fledgling studio released 56 Alice Comedies in the next four years, until the series was replaced by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1927. The series was quite successful, allowing Disney to expand and to improve. In that sense, ‘Alice’s Wonderland’ lay the foundation of the Disney imperium.
Watch ‘Alice’s Wonderland’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Alice’s Wonderland’ is available on the DVD ‘Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities’
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