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Contrary to popular belief Walt Disney's first sustained character was neither Oswald the Rabbit or Mickey Mouse. It was a six-year old real life girl named Alice. While working for an advertising agency in Kansas City Walt experimented with stop-action animation in his spare time. Borrowing an idea from ? ? Max and Dave Fleischer's "Out of the Inkwell" series (which superimposed animated figures on real film backgrounds-allowing a live actor to and superimposed a live actress (Virginia Davis) on an animated background. Eventually there would be 56 Alice cartoons although Virginia was eventually replaced over a pay dispute. ? ? "Alice Gets in Dutch" is an earlier example of the series but Disney had already figured out the basic economies of the cartoon business. It was far cheaper in those days to film live action than to draw the 12 per second frames needed for good animation, and the first half of "Alice Gets in Dutch" is live action. Of course the reverse is true today as computer animation is now cheaper than filming live action ("Ultraviolent" is actually a return to the silent film days where Fleischer's live characters interact with animation).

The short begins with Alice in a classroom where she is blamed when an exploding balloon covers her teacher's face in ink. Alice is banished to a stool in the corner and given a Dunce Cap (when is the last time you saw one of those). She falls asleep and dreams she is outside the schoolhouse dancing with a bunch of cartoon animals. A cartoon version of her teacher (with devil's horns) comes outside the break up the fun. Trailing behind as her assistants are three animated books; labeled reading-writing-arithmetic.

The two sides shoot cannons at each other with inconclusive results until a cayenne pepper charge cause the books to sneeze until they are just piles of pages. But the next charge backfires and Alice and her pals begin to sneeze.

Although crudely drawn the animations do convey a bit of personality and Virginia Davis does a great job with her part.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

An extensive live set up goes into this early Alice short: our heroine is in a schoolroom where she gets into trouble and is made to sit in a corner with a dunce's cap on, whereupon she falls asleep and dreams of cartoonland. Spec O'Donnell is one of her classmates in the live sequence.

Other people commenting on this series have made claims that Alice was a 'groundbreaking' series combining, as it did, live action and animation. In actual fact, Fleischer's 'Out of the Inkwell' series had been in production for six years at this time and had much better production values and scripts. Nonetheless, it is a pleasure to see a print of this early Disney short on the newest Disney Treasures DVD. Take my advice and skip the Leonard Maltin introduction which apologizes for there actually being anything of interest here. Thanks for getting it out to us, Leonard. Worth seeing if you are a Disneyphile or interested in the history of animation.

Alice Gets in Dutch (1924)

*** (out of 4)

Alice finds herself in another adventure after the teacher sits her in the corner where she dreams out a little revenge. Once again the mixture of live action and animation work wonderfully well together in this cute short.

Alice's Wild West Show (1924)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Wonderful Disney short has Alice (Virginia Davis from their Alice's Wonderland) putting on a Wild West show only to have the neighborhood bully show up and try to wreck it. The mix of live action and animation here is very well done and highly entertaining especially one scene where Alice's coach is being chased by Indians. A lot of laughs and some nice suspense as well.

Unlike a typical Alice comedy, this one begins in the real world. Alice is being a class clown and her prank gets her in trouble. While sitting in the dunce chair, she begins to dream of wild adventures--all of which occur with her in the cartoon world. The adventure consists of her and her animal friends doing battle with an evil teacher and her evil textbooks. The teacher, not surprisingly, looks a lot like a cartoon version of her real one!

Apart from Alice being a bit faded in a few portions (possibly due to film decomposition), this is another good Alice film from Walt Disney. The pace is brisk, cute little Virginia Davis is just fine as Alice and the film still holds up reasonably well today. It has a silly sort of charm that most of the films have and it's all in good fun. Well worth seeing.