ALICE’S SPOOKY ADVENTURE (1924)
Animated Short
Article 2331 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-13-2007
Posting Date: 12-30-2007
Directed by Walt Disney
Featuring Virginia Davis, Leon Holmes, Spec O’Donnell

A little girl enters a haunted house to retrieve a baseball. When she is knocked out by falling plaster, she dreams she is in a village of ghosts, where she befriends a cat.

In Disney’s pre-Mickey Mouse days, he made a series of shorts that combined live-action with animation; the series, which centered around a spunky little girl, is known as “Alice in Cartoonland”. Though almost all cartoons have some fantastic content (i.e. talking animals), this one is even more firmly in the genre categories because of the ghosts and spooks that abound. Overall, it’s an okay little short. but most of the humor is derived from the actions of an animated cat who is really just a rip-off of Felix; Disney himself would have the same problem once Mickey Mouse became famous, as many cartoons from other companies would then include animated mice that looked quite a bit like Mickey. Some of the animated tricks are pretty neat, though; I like the moment when Alice takes hold of an animated question mark over her head and it turns into a stick. Still, this one is only mildly interesting.