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.
