Studio: Walt Disney Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler)
Short Synopsis
Alice and Julius the cat are on safari in a cartoon Africa. The jungle is full of comic animals, elephants, monkeys, hippos and a lion, and the film is a string of encounters in which the two explorers are chased, tricked and rescued by turns, with Julius's elastic tail and Alice's nerve getting them out of each scrape, until a climactic chase by the lion ends the picture. What makes the film unusual is its star: Virginia Davis had left the series a year earlier, and all of her footage here is material shot in 1924 and held back, which the studio fitted with new animation to make one more Alice with the original girl. The film survives and was released on the Disney Rarities DVD.
Why It Matters
- As animation, the jungle animals are the attraction: by late 1925 the studio could draw a convincing comic elephant and a lion with personality, and the film is nearly all cartoon, with Alice composited into it in a handful of shots. As a historical object it is odder, a film assembled around leftover footage of a child who had moved on.
- Alice in the Jungle shows the economy of the Winkler years, when every foot of live action was expensive and nothing was wasted, and it closes Virginia Davis's association with Disney, which began in Kansas City in 1923. Davis later said she had no idea the film existed until she saw it decades afterwards.
Notes and Trivia
- A sound version was released on 1 January 1931.
- The film is numbered 26 in the series, between two Margie Gay films, which is why Davis's reappearance surprises viewers watching in order.
- See also: Alice Gets Stung (1925), Alice's Spooky Adventure (1924).