Alice Gets in Dutch (1924)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

"Alice Gets in Dutch" is a 10-minute short film from 1924 and the name in the title and the year (over 90 years old) should tell you that it is another film from the Alice series by the pretty young Walt Disney, who is in his early 20s here. Alice is a little prankster in this one here and she gets sent by her teacher to the corner where she falls asleep promptly and the dream is the animated sequence we see. Alice and her friends fight against an army of books led by her teacher. It is all extremely strange and bizarre from start to finish in this dream sequence and if you were mean, you could wonder what Disney was smoking back then, but then again these old cartoons were frequently very odd because they had to make up for the lack of sound and color in other fields. As for this one, I don#t recommend the watch. Even the little Virginia Davis is fairly forgettable in here.

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.

Alice Gets in Dutch begins in live-action with the title character in a classroom with a lot of other kids, one of whom looks like Mickey Daniels of the Our Gang shorts, singing off-key. The teacher seems stern with her hair bun and glasses. The freckle-faced child who looks like Mickey starts to blow a balloon which he passes to Alice. Teacher notices Alice with balloon and takes it from her. When she pops it, it spreads ink on her face. Alice is sent to corner with dunce cap. She daydreams having animated fun dancing with musical animals. Teacher, with horns, comes out of school with books of reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic walking behind her. They shoot cannonballs that hit Alice and her friends (no real harm though, as this is just a cartoon). Alice and pals retaliate by shooting cayenne pepper from their cannon which causes the books to sneeze their cover and pages out! When teacher retaliates by shooting pepper back, the cat on Alice's side accidentally sneezes his face off! The animated teacher eventually pokes Alice with a cane as we fade back to live-action one doing the same as Alice wakes up. The end. Highly amusing short worth seeing if you're a Walt Disnty enthusiast.

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.