Before he created Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney had his first success with the ALICE COMEDIES (1924-1927). Using a combination of live-action and animation that is still stunningly impressive today, the main character – a plucky young girl named Alice – has a series of hilarious adventures in a cartoon world. In this first film in the series, Alice meets an old sailor whose ripping yarns spark her imagination. The ALICE COMEDIES delight children and adults alike with their absurd, almost surreal humour.

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“By Christmas we delivered our first picture,” Roy said in 1967. “We got twelve hundred dollars. Thought we were rich.” (Roy’s figures were a little off, in both directions. [Distributor] Margaret Winkler offered fifteen hundred dollars per cartoon. The first one, ALICE’S DAY AT SEA, was due January 1, 1924, but Winkler received it the day after Christmas.)

The earliest ALICE COMEDIES are not really cartoons at all, but are instead live-action shorts – strongly resembling Hal Roach’s OUR GANG Series –with animated inserts. They could hardly be anything else, since Walt Disney himself was the only animator (and Roy his cameraman). Disney’s animation is painfully weak even set against the Laugh-O-grams, burdened as it is by poor drawing and a desperate use of every conceivable kind of shortcut.

“In the very early days of making these pictures,” Disney said in 1956, “it was a fight to survive. It was a fight first to get in, to crack the ice. So you used to do desperate things. I used to throw gags and things in because I was desperate.“

Michael Barrier: The Animated Man. A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley 2007

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