In Alice Solves the Puzzle, Alice is having trouble with a crossword puzzle when her cat convinces her to take a break and go to the beach. They go for a swim, but when Alice returns, a bear named Pete insists that she give him the puzzle. Pete, it turns out, is a collector of rare puzzles. Alice refuses and Pete chases her into a lighthouse. Her cat shows up at the end to make the save.
In Alice's Tin Pony, Alice and her cat use a train to deliver a big payroll. One of Pete's gang gets wind of the loot and informs his boss. The gang plots to capture the train and steal the loot.
In Alice Chops the Suey, Alice is kidnapped by a Chinese gang. Her cat rescues her, but from there they are on the run from the villains.
As silly, fanciful pieces of entertainment, Alice Solves the Puzzle and Alice's Tin Pony work. The point of these is never plot. It's all in the simple animation and the cleverness of how Disney uses it. The cat is seems able to use his body to solve any situation. He can weaponize his tail or pull his eyes off to create a bike. Surreal, but interesting.
Alice Chops the Suey is godawful. The short opens with a blatant ripoff of the Out of the Inkwell series with an animator's hand drawing the animation. Then Alice is kidnapped and thrown in a bag. The cat rescues her from stereotypically racist villains and then we get a pretty repetitive chase sequence. Bad, bad, bad.
The big change from the 1924 Alice shorts is that are live action main character exists entirely within a cartoon world now. In the previous two shorts we reviewed, there was a real world sequence bookending the animation. Here, the actual actress only appears in the cartoon world.
Beyond that, with each short, Alice is there less and less, and the cat really comes forward as the star. In Alice Solves the Puzzle, she and the cat have equal screen time. In Alice's Tin Pony, she barely in it. And in Alice Chops the Suey, she's kidnapped in a cartoon bag and spends almost the entirety of the short in that sack. The series feels like it's starting to sideline its lead which makes the films just animated shorts without the cleverness of Alice's interaction with the cartoon world.
Alice Solves the Puzzle ***out of *****
Alice's Tin Pony **1/2 out of *****
Alice Chops the Suey * out of *****
NOTE: Alice Solves the Puzzle features the first appearance by Disney's longest running animated character Pete. Here, he's a bear but in his later iterations he's a dog or a cat. He most recently appeared in the game Epic Mickey.
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