Well its October and that means Halloween is coming up. With that in mind I feel it is a great time to look at a spooky themed Alice Comedy entitled Alice's Spooky Adventure.
The Alice Comedies were Walt Disney's first real series. In these films a live action Alice would find herself in an animated wonderland. This was an unsubtle reversal of what the Fleischer brothers were doing with their Out of the Inkwell series. In that series an animated Koko the clown found his way into the live action world causing havoc there.
Alice's Spooky Adventure was the fourth Alice Comedy. When Walt Disney made the first Alice Comedy (Alice's Wonderland), he was producing various cartoons for Laugh-O-Gram Films in Kanas City. They were mostly involving old fairytales moved in modern day. However he was running into much finical troubles at this time. Unfortunately the studio was bankrupt before the film could be completed. This lead Walt to move to California and get a distribution contract with Margert Winkler (who also distributed the Felix the Cat and Out of the Inkwell). The contract stated that Alice must still be played by Virginia Davis (who played the character in Alice's Wonderland) in the new Alice Comedies. Walt wrote a letter to the Davis family asking them to move to California. Fortunately for Walt they agreed. Immediately after this animation began on the second Alice comedy (Alice's Day at Sea). The problem was at this time Walt did not have the full crew who had worked on Alice's Wonderland. Because of this Walt needed to do most of the work himself including the animation and direction. Walt while certainly a talented animator was not the fastest and was not on the level of Ub Iwerks, who had worked with him on the Laugh-O-Gram films. Because of this pure live action scenes would take up quite a bit of the screen time for these early Alice Comedies. Just as the scenes with animation had a lot of similarities to the Out of the Inkwell series, the pure live action scenes resembled Hal Roach's Our Gang comedy shorts (known by many now as The Little Rascals). This is rather interesting considering how new Our Gang was at the time of these shorts, having just started in 1922. Still the resemblance is hard to ignore with Alice's live action friends often physically resembling the Our Gang kids. Featured in Alice's Spooky Adventure are Spec McDonald, who looked a lot like Our Gang's freckled faced Mickey Daniels and Leon Holmes, this series' answer to chubby Joe Cobb from the Our Gang films. As the series would go on Ub Iwerks would start working for the films and the animation would become much more prominent, while the live action would be pushed further into the background (in some of the later entries live action Alice herself seemed to be just making her short obligatory cameos that had little to do with the animated plot). That was not the case here as the live action takes up a decent portion of the film.
In this film Alice is playing baseball with her friends. However a baseball lands in an old abandoned house and Alice goes to get it out. However a piece of plaster falls down and knocks her unconscious. While unconscious Alice has an animated dream that she is in a town called Spookville. While there her and her new cat friend, go to see a concert. Ghosts seeing them at the concert give chase.
This is a highly entertaining film. The animation definitely lacks the polish and depth of later Disney cartoons, but it more than makes up for it the with pure imagination. Much of this film resembles more of an early Fleischer cartoon than a Disney cartoon. For instance the houses in Spookville grow faces that react to seeing Alice. This is something that you would definitely not see in a later Disney cartoon, but just because it is different does not mean is not effective. These visual ideas are immediately intriguing and pull you into the film. The live action part is also very fun and the closing live action gag is hilarious. All in all this is a great film and I can't help but recommend it.
With Alice's Spooky Adventure Walt was hoping to have a shorter production period than he had on the previous Alice Comedies. However Mother Nature had other plans. The filming of the live action scenes had been continually delayed by clouds and fog.
Margert Winkler was very happy with the film upon receiving it and wrote to Walt, "I will be frank with you and say that I have been waiting for just such a picture as 'Alice's Spooky Adventure' before using it in all territories throughout the world." She did have reservations though about some of the scenes combining live action and animation and asked that they would be retaken. Winkler must have been happy with the introduction of a cartoon cat in this film (later named Julius for future Alice Comedies). In the next Alice Comedy, Alice's Wild West Show a dog would be used as Alice's sidekick and Winkler would write Walt saying "I might suggest that in your cartoon stuff you use a cat whenever possible and don't be afraid to let him do ridiculous things." Not surprisingly the cat would again appear in the following Alice Comedy, Alice's Fishy Story.
Resources UsedWalt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney by J. B. Kaufman and Russell Merritt.
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