Once more, I step into the abyss that is the Alice comedies from Walt Disney.
In Alice's Circus Daze, we see a variety of scenes from the big top, including a rubber man and a lion decapitating his tamer then playing keep away with the head. The short culminates with a tightrope walker balancing Alice atop a dozen chairs.
In Alice the Whaler, our heroine commands a whaling vessel. The crew faces challenges from swabbing the deck to finding eggs on the open sea. The finale has a cry of "Thar she blows!" as the crew tries to take down the powerful whale.
First question: Why is Alice even in these anymore?
When the comedies started, they were an interesting mix of live action and animation. They were never as interesting or clever as the Out of the Inkwell series, but I saw the potential and stuck with it.
It's devolved into cartoons that barely even remember Alice is supposed to be in them.
Take Alice's Circus Daze for example. We get a scene of Alice preparing for her act. She's off in the corner of the screen while the zaniness happens around her. She's not involved at all. Then in the end, it's a wide shot with Alice as pixels at the top of the screen cut with extreme close ups of her face.
All of this would be fine if the animation was interesting or funny. It's not. There are a couple of inventive moments like a janitor removing a giraffe's spots to polish them or the mouse on the boat nailing the goat to the deck, but none of it made me laugh. It didn't even make me smile. At best, there are moments that are interesting.
This is the end of the Alice shorts and I for one could not be happier to see them gone. Walt Disney moves on to Oswald and ultimately Mickey (and you can see echoes of the famous rodent in both Oswald and the mouse in the Alice comedies). As a step in the evolution of Disney animation, these Alice shorts serve a purpose. As entertainment? Not so much.
Alice's Circus Daze *1/2 out of *****
Alice the Whaler * out of *****
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