October 2024 – This Film Is 100 Years Old

The Alice Comedies were a series of short cartoon/live action hybrids, directed by Walt Disney in the mid to late 1920s. A total of 57 shorts were made between 1923 and 1927, and these three were the 2nd, 3rd and 4th releases in the series, all coming out in the first few months of 1924.

As in Alice’s Wonderland (see here), Alice repeatedly falls into a dream and has interactive animated adventures on a theme – she goes to the seaside in Alice’s Day At Sea and dreams of the living under the sea, gets trapped in a haunted house in Alice’s Spooky Adventure and dreams of ghosts, and then dresses up as a sheriff and murders some Indians in Alice’s Wild West Show. I assume that was the style at the time.

The only real change to the format in any of these is that a bunch of fairly stereotypical silent movie kids/street urchins/etc turn up in the real life segments of Alice’s Spooky Adventure and Alice’s Wild West Show, although luckily they don’t intrude on the dream sequences, as they’re all pretty tedious and superfluous, and much, much worse than any of the animals Alice is friends with.

Of these three films, Alice’s Spooky Adventure is by far the best (she even gets engaged to a cat), Alice’s Day At Sea is also pretty good (she gets driven around by a dog – see above – and also there’s an amazing octopus in it – see below) and Alice’s Wild West Show is by far the worst (it takes a whole 6 minutes to even get to any of the animated action, and then it’s mostly rubbish anyway).

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Notes

1. I watched these on youtube. There’s various different versions on there, all of varying quality, but these were the best ones I found: Alice’s Day At Sea; Alice’s Spooky Adventure; Alice’s Wild West Show.

2. There’s another 9 or so of these from 1924, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to think of anything much more to say about them even if I do get around to watching them all.

3. Unless the cat turns up again

4. What an excellent cat to get engaged to

5. Also in Alice’s Day At Sea this guy pesters the dog awake

6. And I’m pretty sure he’s the clock from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared‘s dad.

7. Man, clocks are terrifying, aren’t they?

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Film Information

Title: Alice’s Day At Sea
Director: Walt Disney
Year: 1924
Duration: 10 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: Alice’s Spooky Adventure
Director: Walt Disney
Year: 1924
Duration: 9 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: Alice’s Wild West Show
Director: Walt Disney
Year: 1924
Duration: 13 minutes
Watch: youtube

The Alice Comedies were a series of short cartoon/live action hybrids, directed by Walt Disney in the mid to late 1920s. A total of 57 shorts were made between 1923 and 1927 (although about a quarter of these have since been lost), all of which were directed and produced by Disney, and their success helped launch the Disney studio.

Alice’s Wonderland was the first of these, and essentially remained the template for the rest of the series. In the first half of the story, Alice, a precocious girl in the standard silent film style (and played here by Virginia Davis, although various other actors played the role in subsequent episodes), decides to visit Walt Disney in his studio, and watches him drawing cartoons at his desk, which of course then animate themselves on the page, much to her delight (and ours).

In the second half of the episode, Alice falls asleep and wakes up in an entirely cartoon world, flipping the animations in the real world conceit of the first section on its head. Here she dances with cats and gets chased by lions, before eventually waking up safe and sound in her bed. THE END

(And it really was the end, as Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams studio went bust after completing it, and Walt was never heard of again.)

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Notes

1. I had a free month or two of Disney+ recently, so thought I’d watch all the earliest Disney stuff on there.

2. But they weren’t on there.

3. Obviously being in the public domain means Disney has no interest in them any more.

4. So I had to watch them on youtube instead.

5. Which at least meant I could get screenshots of them I suppose.

6. Also, it’s kind of easy to forget, due to the ubiquity/uniformity of the eventual Disney brand, but Walt Disney really was kind of a genius at first.

7. Before he succumbed to instead simply being fully evil.

8. These must have been hellishly complicated to make.

9. And yet he cranked out a trillion of them all in a row (57)

10. Before abandoning this sort of cartoon/live action hybrid until Mary Poppins, I suppose.

11. Almost makes you wonder why it wasn’t Disney who made Who Framed Roger Rabbit really.

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Film Information

Title: Alice’s Wonderland
Director: Walt Disney
Year: 1923
Duration: 12 minutes
Watch: youtube