Alice Comedies

The "Alice Comedies" are a series of animated cartoons created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a Live action little girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape.

Alice's Wonderland
Disney, Ub Iwerks, and their staff made the first Alice Comedy, a one-reel (ten-minute) Short subject titled Alice's Wonderland, while still heading the failing Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Kansas.

Alice's Wonderland begins with Alice entering a cartoon studio to witness cartoons being created. Alice is amazed by what she sees: The cartoon characters come to life and play around. After heading to bed that night, she dreams of being in the cartoon world, welcomed by all of the characters. Alice plays with them until a group of lions break free from a cage and chase her.

This short helped set the stage for what was to come in the later Alice Comedies, as it established the world as a playful dream and also introduced the elements which would soon define the series.

The Alice Comedies series begins
After completing the film, the studio went bankrupt and was forced to shut down. After raising money by working as a freelance photographer, Disney bought a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles, California to live with his uncle Robert and his brother Roy. In California, Disney continued to send out proposals for the Alice series, in hopes of obtaining a distribution deal, which was finally arranged through Winkler Pictures, run by Margaret Winkler and her fianceé, Charles Mintz, on the basis of Alice's Wonderland. Disney convinced Davis's family to bring her from Missouri to Los Angeles to star in the series.

Content
Although seen as cute and funny in their time, the Alice Comedies contain content which might be considered surprising and somewhat harsh today by sensitive viewers. Alice is a little girl, yet she spends much of her time avoiding danger, and even getting kidnapped by the cartoon villains, threatened with such perils as being tied to a log in a sawmill. These scenes are parodies of similar scenes in movie serials, such as The Perils of Pauline (1914) starring actress Pearl White. One such Alice cartoon, Alice's Mysterious Mystery (1926) features two cartoon characters who resemble members of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the villains drags a dog character into a room marked "Death Chamber" and pulls out a long strand of sausage. In "Alice and the Dog Catcher" she is leader of a club called the Klix Klax Klub, in where the kids wear paper bags with their faces painted on them over their heads.

Shorts and subsequent releases
The shorts are now in the public domain. In 2000, Inkwell Images released a DVD titled Alice in Cartoonland – The Original Alice Comedies by Walt Disney in the series Golden Classics with ten short films from the series as well as some documentaries and a poster gallery. In 2007, Kit Parker Films released another DVD called Alice in Cartoonland by Walt Disney: 35 mm Collector's Set with ten films from the series and a selection of bonus features. There are 14 films from the series on these two DVDs.

In 2005 and again in 2007, ten shorts in the series were released as part of the Walt Disney Treasures series. Seven were part of the Disney Rarities that was released in 2005, while three more were released as part of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, released in 2007.

Walt Disney both directed and produced every film in this series. All animation was done by Walt Disney himself in the period of time before he was financially stable enough to employ a team of animators for successive films. Four actresses have played Alice: Virginia Davis (15), Margie Gay (31), Dawn O'Day (1) and Lois Hardwick (10). The film Alice in the Jungle contains only archival footage of Virginia Davis.