Studio: Walt Disney Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler)
Short Synopsis
Alice goes out and leaves Julius the cat in charge of the house, with orders to keep the rats down. Julius falls into a barrel of home brew in the cellar, gets drunk and is useless, and the rats take over the place: they raid the kitchen, dance on the furniture, play the piano and the phonograph, bathe in the sink and turn the house into a rodent cabaret, with the Charleston and other dances of the day performed by mice in the manner of the series' animal parties. When Alice comes home the house is a wreck, and the finale is a rout of the rats. The film survives, was given a sound reissue in 1931, and has been released on DVD, so the rats' party is well documented.
Why It Matters
- The rats' revels are the point: a dozen tiny figures dancing in rhythm, years before sound, in a sequence that prefigures the musical animal parties of the Silly Symphonies. The piano-playing rat and the sink bath are the kind of gags Disney's animators were now inventing freely, and the drunken Julius is a Prohibition joke for the parents.
- Rattled by Rats is one of the most-seen Alice films because of its DVD releases, and it shows the series at its best in late 1925, when the cartoon world had almost swallowed the live-action premise. The film also contains early versions of the mouse gags that Disney would return to with Mickey.
Notes and Trivia
- A sound version was released on 1 May 1931.
- The film appears in the Alice in Cartoonland DVD and in the Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares collection.
- See also: Alice the Jail Bird (1925), Alice's Balloon Race (1926).