There is no cliché more annoying in the annals of Disney history than It all started with a mouse, because it really didn't.
…No, wait, scratch that, there is no cliché more annoying in the annals of Disney history than starting an article about pre-1928 Disney by refuting the It all started with a mouse dogma. But then again, here were are. So.
For those who do not know, the first Walt Disney cartoon was actually a hugely uninspiring animated newsreel created for a backwater cinema theater belonging to some fellow by the name of Newman. Only the pilot of that series remains, under the title of Newman Laugh-o-Gram. After his contract with Newman ended, Walt Disney took the Laugh-o-Gram brand to greener pastures and created a cycle of off-kilted fairy tale adaptations under this title. Among the characters developed therein was an adventurous black cat, later known as Julius.
Then things took a turn for the ambitious as Disney's growing band of ragtag artists took on the massively more ambitious project of the Alice Comedies, a series where a live-action girl by the name of Alice traveled about in an animated landscape. The series reintroduced Julius the Cat in its third episode (Alice's Spooky Adventure; watch it here), beginning the long-running tradition of shared characters as Disney jumped from one series to another — Julius tied the Laugh-o-Grams to Alice, and Peg-Leg Pete, introduced in the 15th episode of Alice will later brige the gap with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse. And if you want to keep playing that game, the Skeletons from Episode 1 of Silly Symphonies recurred in the Mickey short The Haunted House , though in this case the timeline is flipped. Not to mention, of course, that it's a fairly straightforward line from Mickey to Donald to DuckTales.
But I digress. The first few Alice episodes played with the notion that the animated segments would just be dreams or tall tales of Alice, and had bookend segments in live-action; while these segments are pretty darn fun in their own right, it was clearly the cartoon bits that people wanted to see more of, so the framing devices were jettisoned pretty quickly to just cut to Alice having wacky adventures in the cartoon setting, whose reality was no longer in doubt.
I am a big fan of the Alice Comedies — not only is the animation as good and inventive as anything Disney did back in the 1920's and early 1930's (there is an imagination in the early black-and-white stuff that very much rivals what Warner Bros. was doing by the mid-1930's), but the various child actresses to have portrayed Alice are some of the best of their kind. For lack of serious dramatic moments to examine I can't truly name them among the very best of child actors, but there is no denying that Virginia Davis is one of my favorite child actresses of all times. And Dawn O'Day, Margie Gay and Lois Hardwick were no slouches either (with the latter perhaps coming closest of the lot to recapturing the same charming magic as Virginia Davis).
What's more, Alice and Julius have much more chemistry as costars than many comedy duos from the era, or at least, a much more interesting kind of chemistry. You don't have “the dumb, slow one” and “the long-suffering wily one”, or even a duo of fools; instead, Julius is a goof, but more in the way of an overconfident boy than an idiot (his age is never clarified, but the fact that he's just as much of a kid as Alice is, I think, enshrined by the fact that clearly we're not supposed to feel weird about it in Spooky Adventure when he proposes to her on a whim), while Alice has more spunk but less courage, and is the more inventive one of the two, acting towards Julius kind of like a more cunning younger sibling who feels responsible for her silly big brother, but doesn't want to let on to him that she's the one taking care of him rather than the other way around.
But good things sometimes, sadly, come to an end. (I would have said ‘always’ as the proverb requires, but Mickey Mouse's about as old and it certainly hasn't.) So today, after this gaudily long intro, let's have look at the last Alice Comedies short — or, rather, the last available one, because the actual last short in the series is unavailable to the public and the one before that is missing form the archives.
From 1927, Alice the Whaler is one of the Lois Hardwick picture, not that you could tell, for she is not in it very much. Jumping right into the criticism, this is the big issue of this third-to-last hurrah for the Alice and Julius duo, namely that they have their movies stolen from under them. From the title, this is supposed to be about Alice going on a whaling trip, presumably with Julius as first mate; and nominally that's what this is, except that what you'd expect to take up the whole cartoon, namely the actual business of Julius and Alice whaling, starts less than one minute before the end and is left without a resolution. Julius is on-screen for all of 10 seconds, and does not, at any point, interact with Alice,fares slightly better; she gets something like, oh, 30 seconds. Yes, they are 30 delightful seconds of Lois Hardwick hamming up as she alternates between dancing a sailor's jig and pretending to be Captain Ahab, but there is no getting around the fact that 30 seconds of a six-minute cartoon is a pretty slim share for what is supposed to be (and clearly has it in her to be) the main character.
That's 40 seconds accounted for of the slim 6:14 runtime — what else? Not very much of substance as you'll have gathered. The crew of varyingly-anthropomorphized animals goof off and laugh at each other's silliness. Some of these gags are good (there is a great bit with a wholly non-anthropomorphic goat who, presumably thanks to experience in mountainous areas, remains perfectly balanced as it stands on the deck, no matter how many times the ship threatens to flip over), mind you, but it's all very insubstantial.
The most interesting thing is no doubt that three characters are given particular attention in all fo this; one is a monkey whom the animators clearly liked way more than I do, but the others are a cohort of mischievous mice wearing shorts and nothing else, and a fat bully of a cat, the ship's cook. It's hard — nay, impossible — to look at it and not see shades of Steamboat Willie; if we accept David Gerstein's argument that Steamboat Willie was not meant to reimagine the thus-far ursine Peg-Leg Pete as a cat, but rather feature a separate “cat bully” character called Terrible Tom, then it might be worth it to consider the hypothesis that ‘Tom’ debuted much earlier than usually reckoned.
All this makes Alice the Whaler an extremely typical 1920's cartoon, and an extremely poor send-off for the brilliantly inventive Alice Comedies, sidelining the main characters as it does; but a typical 20's cartoon is still a nice enough watch if you've got five minutes, and it does feature a strange glimpse of the future. And also Lois Hardwick dancing a sailorman's jig, and guys, I'm telling you, she's adorable. So go on then! Scroll back up and watch it!…
Post-Scriptum:
- …Unless you prefer to forego the modern Alexander Rannie rescoring and go with the earlier 1930's Raytone Films rescoring. I linked to the Rannie version earlier because the picture quality (and, of course, sound quality, on a purely technical level) was better, but this is the more period-accurate one, certainly. Both orchestrations have their strengths; take your pick.
- I didn't address the obviously-problematic-to-modern-ears matter of the story's being about, well, whaling. That's because the cartoon itself doesn't care very much about being about whaling; it's just an excuse to put the characters on the boat. It's true that some harm does come to a whale (and a mother at that) in the last thirty seconds, though. Pretty nasty stuff, but then again, this is a series where in Pete's debut, Julius had his tail cut off with a sword while Pete himself ended up skewered on a big metal rod cast adrift at sea. I think the whale would have been fine if the series had lasted long enough for it to make a return appearance.
- It has recently occurred to me that Alice Comedies' being in the public domain means Pete probably should be too, if only in his bear design. Hmmm.
- It has further occurred to me that combining said public-domain-ness of the series and my griping about the lack of a proper Alice finale, the world is ripe for me to write an achingly nostalgia-filled novel where an adult Alice reunites with Julius and they return to Spookville where they first met to fight bad guys together. This is no joke, folks, I'm gonna write this someday, and it's going to be great.
