Studio: Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio
Distributor: Winkler Pictures
Short Synopsis
On a sunny morning Alice, a real girl played by Virginia Davis, goes to the beach with her dog. She meets an old sailor and asks if he has ever been shipwrecked; he tells her about the time a giant octopus attacked his ship. Thrilled, Alice wishes she were a sailor, climbs into a small boat and falls asleep. In her dream, now an animated world around the live-action Alice, her ship is wrecked in a storm and sinks to the sea floor. Fish play music, and Julius the Cat, with a fish's tail, walks three kitten-fish. A huge fish comes after Alice. She escapes in an undersea taxicab, but the fish swallows the car and Alice, and then a narwhal. Alice causes so much trouble inside that the fish faints, and she walks out unharmed while the narwhal and the car limp out bandaged. Hiding behind a rock, she is seized by an octopus, and wakes up tangled in a fishing net. The sailor frees her and they laugh about her dream.
Why It Matters
- The joke-dense sea floor, with every animal reinvented as a fish, shows Disney's young team inventing gags as fast as they could draw them, and the reverse of Out of the Inkwell's premise, a real child walking into a cartoon world rather than a cartoon escaping into ours, is still charming.
- It was the first Alice Comedy released and the first film produced by the Disney brothers' new Hollywood studio. The series' success with distributor Margaret Winkler kept the studio alive long enough for Disney to create Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and, after losing him, Mickey Mouse.
Notes and Trivia
- Its poster sold at Christie's for $36,534, listed by Guinness at the time as the most valuable cartoon poster ever sold, until a poster for the Mickey Mouse short The Mad Doctor fetched $138,000 in 2006.
- See also: Alice's Brown Derby (1926), Trolley Troubles (1927).