Studio: Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler)
Short Synopsis
A gang of children are playing ball when it goes through the window of the neighbourhood haunted house. Nobody dares go in except Alice, played by the five-year-old Virginia Davis. Inside, she trips, bangs her head and passes into a cartoon dreamworld, a ghost town in which the live-action girl, superimposed on the drawings, rescues a cat from a gang of spooks and does battle with the ghosts. She wakes, retrieves the ball and climbs out, only to find that the police have arrived to investigate the disturbance; taking her for the culprit, they chase her and, in the film's deadpan ending, arrest her. The cat she rescues is the prototype of Julius, the Felix-like cat who would become her regular partner.
Why It Matters
- The ghost-town sequence is the first time the Alice series uses the cartoon world for something other than a stunt: the gags with the spooks have a rhythm and a sense of place, and the combination of the real child and the drawn cat, achieved by filming Davis against white and printing the drawings around her, is cleaner than in the first two films.
- The Alice Comedies were Walt Disney's first Hollywood productions, made after the bankruptcy of his Kansas City studio and sold to Margaret Winkler, the first woman distributor of cartoons. Spooky Adventure is the third of 57 and the point at which the series found its format: a short live-action set-up, a cartoon adventure, and a snapped-shut ending. Without them there would have been no Oswald and no Mickey.
Notes and Trivia
- Virginia Davis had appeared in the pilot Alice's Wonderland in Kansas City; Disney brought her family to Hollywood for the series.
- Spec O'Donnell, one of the boys, became a familiar face in Hal Roach comedies and the Our Gang shorts.
- See also: Alice's Wild West Show (1924), Alice Solves the Puzzle (1925).