User Reviews

This is one of the Alice comedies from the Walt Disney studio. There will be spoilers ahead:

The Alice comedies were generally decent cartoon/live action combinations worth watching. They did have the occasional misfire. This one, sadly, is one of those misfires.

For one thing, it starts out like a Fleischer studio "Out of the Inkwell" short without the charm. When the best scene in the cartoon is right at the beginning and it's a cartoon cat arguing with the cartoonist for a tail, you're in for a long seven minutes or so.

Alice comes out of the inkwell more or less an animated blob of ink, to shake off the ink and become a live action girl. The live action element vanishes rather quickly when Alice is abducted by a Chinese-looking rat and stuffed in a "sack" made of the cat's fur.

The cat gives chase, tracks down the rat's hiding place, a number of fairly standard visual gags happen, the cat retrieves Alice and runs off. A pack of Chinese rats give chase, some more visual gags come and go until Alice and the cat regain the inkwell, jump in and are rescued by the cartoonist retrieving the bottle. That's it for this one.

This is worth watching once.

. . . ALICE CHOPS THE SUEY? When you type in the last word of this title, a squiggly red line appears underneath it, similar to the sort of red-lining that you'd expect to see when parents are purging books on the library shelves of a prairie state elementary school. Some of these book depositories are down to only a couple books, and pupils have to bring their own crayons. Fortunately, the musical score for this silent film does not include the composition commonly referred to as "Chop Sticks," because that sounds like a term that also would violate the terms of usage, if not today than very soon. And why do the Dizzy people think that they can get away with a rodent throwing a sword into the title gal's derriere, even given the fact that she's concealed in a bag? The only way that this sharp instrument is lodged elsewhere is if she's trotting backwards, and that would make the whole outrage even worse!