Alice au pays des merveilles

This short film is a great, surreal piece of animation from the early days. The technique of combining live action and animation is impressive for the time period. The actual contents of the film are strange and funny as you'd expect.

"Alice's Wonderland" is the beginning of a long history of Disney treatment of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. These Alice comedies were loosely inspired by them. Although this one, reportedly, wasn't theatrically released, but was rather made as a proof-of-concept for potential distributors, it's better than others from the series I've seen, including the earliest released one, "Alice's Day at Sea" (1924). Later, Disney would reference "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" with Mickey Mouse in "Thru the Mirror" (1936) and Donald Duck in "Donald in Mathmagic Land" (1959). So, clearly Walt and company had a long-standing interest in the books besides misspelling Carroll's name in the 1951 feature-length cartoon and, as both Carroll and Walt rolled over in their graves, the 3D, CGI monstrosities of 2010 and 2016.

The other Alice comedies don't seem to have anything to do with the books besides featuring a girl named Alice, the dream framing, and her subsequent curious scenarios involving anthropomophic animals. Basically, the same thing happens in this one, except there is a place called "Cartoonland," with its obvious wordplay on "Wonderland," that Alice visits in her dream. There's also a bit of a clock motif, with the animators refereeing the boxing cats and the Cartoonland welcoming committee checking their pocket watches. Alice, as in the books, also goes through a doorway in a tree and a rabbit hole before falling in a fashion similar to that seen in other "Alice in Wonderland" films, except here it happens at the end instead of at the beginning of the dream. There's some dancing and music, too, including a pun made of jazz cats (you guessed it--cartoon cats playing jazz). Best of all, however, is that the dream is connected to the earlier studio-tour footage. One interpretation of the Alice books is that they're a parable for a girl's making sense--or nonsense--of the adult world; likewise, this film Alice is introduced to the adult world of making children's cartoons, which she then dreams about. Not bad for an early experiment in combining live-action cinematography and hand-drawn animation that was never commercially released until it appeared as an extra for DVDs and Blu-rays of the 1951 feature.

This marriage of live-action and animation was also a preoccupation of the day for the rival Fleischer Studios, including with such Out of the Inkwell installments as "Cartoon Factory" (1924), which pit the animator in a battle against his creations. "Alice's Wonderland," on the other hand, takes a different reflexive approach more akin to other studio-tour films of the era, such as "A Tour of the Thomas H. Ince Studio" or the "1925 Studio Tour" of MGM, which also highlighted the filmmaking processes of the companies, as well as advertising their stars. In "Alice's Wonderland," this also gives way to films-within-films as what the animators--the actual ones for Disney and including Walt himself--draw for Alice comes to life on the white boards, with a cat running away from a mouse and the aforementioned cat boxing match. Overall, the drawings are charming enough, and the combination of live-action and animation is effective. Sure, some of the repetitive backgrounds--such as employing the same three characters lined up for Alice's parade in Cartoonland--are relatively lazy, and there's little rhyme or reason to the occasional iris framing, "Alice's Wonderland" remains impressive for a film that was never even theatrically released, including some economical editing through eyeline matches and such to save on the double-exposure matte work and placing of a live Alice within a Cartoonland.

If it weren't for a lovely four-year-old girl, the Walt Disney Company, a multi-billion dollar business and a huge entertainment conglomerate, may not have possibly been established. Young Walt Disney had been contracted to produce a series of cartoons known as 'Laugh-O-Grams,' but the paying Tennessee company went bankrupt, leaving the artist and his employees stuck with a number of cartoons he couldn't sell. Disney's loyal artists left his East 31st Street, Kansas City studio before Walt secured $500 from a dentist to produce an educational short on dental hygiene.

Instead of paying off his debts, Disney decided to plow the money into his new brain-child: a live-action combined with a cartoon that could serve as a demonstration to what his floundering company was capable of producing. He spotted a cute little girl in an advertisement and immediately traced her to Virginia Davis. He contacted her mother, Margaret, who was eager to advance her daughter's acting career. Walt's idea was the opposite of the Fleischer Studios 'Out of the Inkwell' cartoon series: instead of animated characters interacting with the real world, Disney placed his child actress into a cartoon-filled world.

He temporarily hired his artists back, who filmed and drew Virginia dreaming about herself in cartoon land. Experiencing a sureal sequence of both pleasant and nightmarish events, Alice (Virginia) eventually awakens in her mother's arms. Her dream was triggered by a visit earlier in the day to the Laugh-O-Gram Studio where Walt, seen for the first time on film, and the other artists amuse Alice with animated characters on their drawing boards.

Disney knew he had a winner on his hands. He corresponded with the top distributor for cartoon films, Margaret Winkler, who was handling both the 'Out of the Inkwell" as well as 'Felix The Cat' cartoons in nationwide theaters. He wrote to the New York distributor Winker, who wrote back saying she was intrigued by the idea of the "clever combination of live characters and cartoons." Meanwhile, the Fleischer Brothers, getting rich off of Winkler's work, decided to form their own distribution network for its 'Out of the Inkwell' series. On the heels of that withdrawal, Felix's creator Pat Sullivan decided to yank his cat from Winkler when their contract expired after one too many fights, creating a golden opportunity for Disney.

Walt took a train in the summer of 1923 to show Winkler the work in progress of "Alice's Wonderland." After seeing the pilot reel, she offered $1,500 per reel of Alice shorts, with Virginia Davis in the lead role. Walt signed a one-year contract to produce the series, contingent that Winkler would edit all the Alice cartoons herself. Disney immediately moved to California, living with his brother Roy, and working out of his garage for a brief time. He called his new company, Disney Brothers, which eventually morphed into Walt Disney Productions.

Virginia and her mother, Margaret, moved to Los Angeles partly for the $100 per month salary Walt was offering, and partly because the young girl's doctor, knowing her fragile health, said she would benefit with a dryer, warmer climate. Virginia was in 13 'Alice Comedies' episodes, while four other Alices followed her. Disney, who directed and produced all 57 films, drew most of the cartoons. It became obvious, however, as the series marched on, he was more interested on the animation aspect of each film as he diminished the live action sequences. The 'Alice Comedies' ended in July 1927 when a rabbit came upon the scene.

When Walt Disney was just starting out he worked for an advertising agency in Kansas City drawing theatrical cartoon ads and experimented with stop-action animation in his spare time. His first animation venture "Laugh-O-Grams" was unsuccessful but its last gasp before going out of business was an unfinished one-reel (12 minute) cartoon called "Alice's Wonderland".

Max and Dave Fleischer had already introduced a cartoon series called "Out of the Inkwell" which superimposed animated figures on real film backgrounds (allowing a live actor to interact with a cartoon character). Walt borrowed this idea for the first segments of "Alice's Wonderland" and for the later segments he reversed it and superimposed a live actress (Virginia Davis) on an animated background. Virginia's mother let them shoot the live scenes in her house with Virginia's aunt playing Alice's mother.

The film begins with little Alice visiting an animation studio, where Walt and Ub Iwerks are working. They show her some scenes on their drawing boards and these turn into moving cartoons, which interact with live things in the studio. The best is a cartoon mouse (imagine that) poking a live cat until it moves. Although everything was silent in 1923 some music was later added to the production.

Back home from her day at the studio, the sleeping Alice dreams of taking a train to cartoon- land. She appears in live action superimposed on a cartoon background and interacts with a variety of cartoon animals. Finally, she jumps off a cliff and after falling for a while wakes up in her own bed.

Walt ran out of money before "Alice's Wonderland" could be finished and his company was disbanded. He moved out to Los Angeles and eventually sent what had been completed to an independent cartoon distributor in New York who contracted for a series of Alice cartoons.

Virginia Davis joined Walt in California and they began cranking out the series. Eventually there would be 56 Alice cartoons although Virginia was eventually replaced over a pay dispute.

"Alice's Wonderland" was probably never really completed. It appears that at some point they reassembled it to provide an ending (basically just a repeat of an earlier scene in a different context). It is also likely that the falling scene was originally intended for a rabbit hole entrance to Wonderland at the start of the dream sequence, but was moved to the end to substitute for the unfinished portion.

These silent cartoons are surprisingly entertaining. More importantly, Alice qualifies as Disney's first enduring character and the Alice series was his first successful venture.

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

I once commented on this short film without, regrettably, having even seen what I thought at the time was the whole film (just a couple of clips in a documentary on Disney's early career, which I thought were it). Seeing the whole short now on a rarity-Disney DVD collection is a nice revelation for what was to come for Disney, chiefly in his silent pictures.

He made a bunch of these little Alice shorts, which ran in the silent film days in between and before features, all starring a plucky little 5 year old girl played by Virginia Davis. I'm not sure if this one is the best or most funny or successful of the shorts as I've yet to see most of them. But as a kind of pilot episode, one setting up the broad strokes of the series, it could've been a lot worse. As it is it's a kind of early technical marvel, a great pinpoint of the further innovations throughout the century, however crude or slow the process would be, in having animation with live actors. Here, Alice starts off by watching Disney himself drawing some 'funnies' or animated comics. It's infectious for her, and she dreams in a kind of Cartoonland dream where all sorts of little animals and other creatures give her goofy delights (you even see a few with hats as the welcoming committee at a train station). But once the lions break out of the Cartoonland zoo, ho-ho, wackiness ensues!

This maybe isn't the greatest 'art', and it may have just been meant as filler in some way, but it might be closer to something artistic in its extremely absurd way. Ub Iwerks' animation, with Disney's direction, is perfect for the mindset of a little girl or other kid, and it even features little bits of true hilarity, like when a Lion takes out his upper row of teeth and files then down. It's a silent film with little quirks and pips in the soundtrack, and not for one mili-second does it take itself seriously. For that alone it should be recognized; it's a really neat work of repeated, crude but nice little cartoons, with a plucky Davis in the part.