Alice the Whaler

So today we end the Alice Comedies, at least on this site, but fear not my friends, we will move forward into a new world of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, not with trepidation, but with courage. Or, with a DVD player. Something like that.

Speaking of new, I neglected to mention in my Alice’s Circus Daze review that we have a new Alice. Lois Hardwick took over the role beginning with Circus Daze and lasted the remainder of the series unless I’m mistaken. Of all of them, Hardwick is probably the best actress of the bunch, but she gets very little screen time, because at this point, Walt and his animators had lost interest in the live action parts of the shorts, and were focusing almost exclusively on the animation.

Alice the Whaler starts like all good Alice shorts do, with the patented Alice dance party. The deck of Alice’s whaling ship is alive with her dance as well as the dance of her animal friends. It’s a cross species dance-a-palooza.



The main story of the short, though, is very lacking. The main focus seems to be on a mouse character, who gets orders from a grumpy cook. The mouse fights off some dishes that end up crashing on his head from the bumpy waves. Then, the cook orders him to go and get some eggs.



The mouse decides that in order to get eggs, he needs to lasso a bird from the mast of the ship, so he does so. Finally getting eggs, the cook asks for milk, which the mouse gets from a goat on deck, which moves back and forth with the waves. None of this is really all that appealing visually, and it’s not very entertaining.



What it does do though, is offer a glimpse at what was to come. The mouse is not the Mickey-esque design we saw in the 1926 shorts, but instead has long ears like a rabbit, and is more reminiscent of Oswald than Mickey.

We do see our erstwhile friend Julius, however briefly, as he climbs the lookout and spots a whale in the distance. This is his five seconds of screen time for the short, which is sad for a character that has been so central to the series.



The finale of the series comes when a monkey first mate shoots a harpoon into the whale that Julius spotted, and the whale drags the boat over the waves. As far as story goes, it’s terrible. There’s no real flow to the story, no conflict or resolution of any kind.



The animation is…well, that’s the thing. I’ve seen reviews of this short on Disneyshorts.org, and people there claim that it’s a step up from the earlier shorts. Certainly the backdrops are better, the characters are more fluid. But as far as visual appeal, I do not think the stick and hose animation is very good. It does not portray the full personality the way that I thought some of the earlier shorts did. Just my opinion, but having watched all these films in a row, this stands out as “different,” for better or worse.

So, that brings our Alice viewing to an end, unless I can get the Netherlands to send me copies of some of the missing shorts. Don’t think I’m not trying. Next up is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and the evolution of the Disney animation continues.

Alice's Circus Daze

As I mentioned, yesterday’s review of Alice the Fire Fighter brought us to the end of the surviving 1926 Alice shorts. Today, we review one of the two remaining 1927 Alice Comedies. If there are more out there, and you’re aware of them, please let me know, but I think that Alice’s Circus Daze, which we’ll review today, and Alice the Whaler, which will be next, are the only two left.

That said, going back to yesterday’s review, I noted the possible beginning of a trend. In the later Mickey shorts, it seemed as though the main action was always Mickey entering a conflict with a companion (Goofy, Donald, Pluto or a combination) and then the action veered off to see what each character did, before merging again at the end. Anyone who read old Justice League comic books will recognize this technique, and it’s quite common in dramatic cop shows as well.



Today’s short, though, does not show signs of that technique becoming a recurring theme. There really is no conflict in Alice’s Circus Daze, and although there is an overarching story of the circus, the focus is more on random gags than on a coherent story.

The short opens with the circus getting ready, and some random shots of acts on the outside stages with the barkers getting in the crowds. A lion scares the crowd, the rubber man interacts with his barker and even the spots on the giraffe get polished. After this, we see Alice and Julius in their dressing rooms getting ready, and a poster on the wall lets us know that they are the stars of the show.



Back in the big top, various acts are scattered about, including a tiger show where the tamer keeps losing his pants, and a lion act where the lions bite off the tamer’s head and play keep away with it. It’s all done in a humorous manner, and is quite fun if a bit repetitive.



Finally, we see Alice and Julius’ act, which is a high wire show. Alice is precariously balanced on top of stack of chairs, which rest on Julius’ nose.



Getting over confident, Julius lights up a cigar, and tossing the match away, lights the high wire on fire, burning it up. He falls to the ground, but Alice and the chairs stay up in the air. The chairs start falling away one by one from the bottom, and Julius scrambles to find a way to save her. He grabs a ladder and sticks it under her as the ringmaster runs over. The combined weight of Julius and Alice on such a flimsy ladder causes it to fall down, though, crushing the ringmaster.



The short ends with Julius and Alice running out of the big top, chased by the ringmaster. It’s amusing to note that Julius and Alice are hardly the stars of this short, despite what their dressing room poster would have us note. Instead, this seems like a chance for the animators to stretch their wings and have some fun plotting out gags. However, the lack of conflict in the short along with the scattered approach to the storytelling keep this from being one of the better Alice shorts. If the quality is the same in the 1927 shorts, it’s no wonder that the series was soon ended.

Alice the Fire Fighter

One more short survives from 1926, and that’s Alice the Fire Fighter. After that, we’ll move on to 1927, which sees the end of the Alice shorts, and the beginning of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But to me, Alice the Fire Fighter seems like it could be the beginning of something that will continue for quite some time.

The story here is simple, there’s a fire and Alice and her fire fighters are called in to put it out. But that is what is so significant. Unlike some of the previous shorts, where we would spend 1-2 minutes in a dance party, 1-2 minutes in a chase sequence and attempt to bridge the gap between them with a shaky story foundation, the fire fighting is the story, and all the gags fall under that umbrella.



This is something that is very prevalent in the later Mickey Mouse shorts. Mickey and some companion, be it Pluto, Goofy or Donald or a combination of the three, are wrapped up in a task (window washing, ghost hunting, etc.) and the short involves the gags that each character gets wrapped up in. Alice the Fire Fighter is the first time I have really seen that sort of storytelling used with the Alice shorts.



The short opens with the fire in a nearby hotel, and a mouse runs out to ring the bell. The Clang of the bell awakens a succession of Julius clones, who mobilize to the fire with Alice leading the way. Back at the hotel, there are some fun gags, like the dog piano player playing notes to let the rats run down them to safety.



One of the Julii (is that the correct plural of Julius?) can’t reach the dog in the top window, so one of his brethren pushes the hotel closer. Others try to rescue a black and white dog trapped on the top floor, who jumps towards a safety net, misses and bounces off the ground onto the net.



The final sequence involves a female cat stuck in the seemingly huge top room of the building. One of the Julius clones tries to climb the spout to rescue her, but falls down. He eventually gets the idea to use the fire engine, and climb on top of the cloud of smoke being put out and ride it to the top. Both he and the female cat escape, make it to the ground and fall into each other’s arms.



As I said, it’s simple, but it seems to be showing us a preview of the format of Mickey cartoons to come. I’ll be interested to see if this pattern picks up in the Oswalds, since there are so few Alices left to review. Is the pattern of a task providing the story umbrella something that continues? I’ll have to wait and see.

Alice in the Wooly West

We’re now getting to the point of the Alice Comedies where relatively few of the films have actually survived. To be honest, I have not been looking ahead at the Alice shorts, because I knew that not all of them were still around, but its startling to note how few are left. Today’s short, Alice in the Wooly West, is the only remaining one from 1926, and I have only one other left, from 1927.

To go on a mini-rant here – it’s a shame that these films no longer exist. As we’ve seen, there are big changes from 1926 to 1926 in the animation that is done by the Disney Studio. To be missing nearly an entire year plus of work on the Alice series and only have the Oswalds from 1927 is missing a big chunk of the development that takes place.

Regardless, after the horrors of war in Alice’s Little Parade and the bleak sausage making of Alice’s Mysterious Mystery, Alice in the Wooly West is a welcome return to form for the Disney animators. This short features more of the familiar gags and plotlines that you would expect from the previous Alice shorts.



The short opens with Julius as a rip roarin’ cowboy, involving his horse in several rope twirling gags. Shortly, though, we focus on Pete and his mouse gang, who are menacing a stagecoach. They shoot the wheels off the coach, which sprouts legs and runs away, slamming into a tree. The mice surround it and menace the passengers.



Julius notes this, and comes storming to the rescue. He’s at the top of a cliff above the melee, though, so he surfs down on the horse’s belly, before launching into a shooting escapade with his guns. Despite having six shooters, Julius lets off what seems like a hundred different shots in a nifty animated sequence.



However, Pete gets away, grabbing Alice in the process. Julius chases, confronting Pete on top of a cliff. They fight there for a minute or so, before tumbling to the bottom.



At the bottom of the cliff, the two fall into a pile of rocks, which leads to a neat comic sequence of each one popping up behind different rocks. When Pete pops up, Julius pops up elsewhere, and they trade rocks, swap positions and eventually end up far apart. Julius comes up with an idea, though. He removes his skin, then sends the suddenly lifelike skin out to decoy Pete, then sneaks up behind him and cracks Pete on the head.



Julius puts on his skin as Alice greets him as “My Hero” when the short ends. It’s definitely a sea change from the things we saw in the last two shorts. There were two shorts produced between those and this one, though, that have not survived. So, the question is did Walt rein in some of the outlandish stuff that took place in the previous shorts, or is it simply a case of different animators leading the efforts? There is not enough evidence to say either way, as these early years were not heavily documented.

My guess would be a little of both. I would say that Walt rode shotgun more on some films than others, and indulged Ub’s flights of fancy sometimes and not others. That would explain the inconsistency of the shorts and the widely varying subject matters. I’d have to dig deeper into the later work of Harman, Ising and others to see if some of these same themes pop up more, but I know from some of my commenters (thanks, guys) that those two in particular repeated some of their Alice gags and subject matter in later work.

Alice's Mysterious Mystery

I have to say, I have watched a lot of cartoons while doing this project. I’ve watched all the Alice Comedies up to this point, and I’ve even seen some Looney Tunes, Felix the Cat, some Ub Iwerks shorts from his independent days and many others. In all of that, I’ve never seen a short so brutal as Alice’s Mysterious Mystery. It’s just….breathtaking.

The thing is that this short is such a departure from some of the topics of earlier shorts. Instead of taking care of a cute kid like in Alice’s Orphan, this short mutilates them and turns them into sausage, and I’m not even kidding a little.

The whole thing opens with Pete and his mouse chauffer driving through the countryside when they spot a school yard nearby. Several young dogs are playing outside, which gives Pete an idea. He and the mouse don what can only be described as KKK robes, and sneak up behind the school.



That alone would be enough to probably get this cartoon banned today, but it gets worse. The mouse scampers up to the top of the schoolhouse, rings the bell, and the dogs run inside. As soon as the last one is inside, Pete slams the door shut, picks the house up off its hinges, then dumps the dogs into his car.



Alice and Julius are nearby, and hear one of the dogs scream for help. They follow Pete out of the country into a city. Pete somehow has let the dogs go, and is trapping them with a beautiful female dog in a window. When the dogs get close enough to profess their love, Pete signals the mouse, and the dogs are dropped through a trap door into the horror factory below.



Once down there, they are hit on the head by another white robed figure, then tossed into one of three different pens, labeled Grade A, B or C. Then, they come out of the pen and are escorted to the “death chamber,” and yes, it’s labeled as such in the film. One dog is even taken to a priest first by the white robed figure.



This is chilling imagery. I can’t even describe how it made me feel. I understand the idea behind the short, but the thought of young dogs, which are representing children here, being led to their deaths is simply horrible. This is a Walt Disney cartoon?
Finally, Julius puts an end to this horror by kicking Pete down the chute, then releasing the dogs to chase him away.



I really am speechless about this one. The war imagery from Alice’s Little Parade was not gruesome in any way, but instead gave you the cartoon violence you would expect, although ramped up from some of the earlier shorts. Alice’s Mysterious Mystery is way beyond that. It’s simply scary. I can imagine some children having to be ushered out of theaters after seeing it.

Based on what I have read about Ub Iwerks later shorts, I have to believe that he was responsible for this short. Ub’s humor always tended towards the more outrageous, and when he went out on his own, that was amplified. He had St. Peter flip the bird to someone in one of his shorts, for example. If I’m correct, then the theories about Ub and Walt’s partnership seem to be true – that without Walt’s guidance to the tastes of the public and storytelling acumen, then Ub was not able to succeed. But the inverse is also true – without Ub’s designs and animating skills, Walt was not able to succeed as well.

Alice's Little Parade

Alice’s Little Parade is neither a little short, nor about a parade. Discuss.

Okay, now that we have today’s Coffee Talk joke out of the way, we can discuss the latest in the Alice films. Alice’s Little Parade shows great improvement to my untrained eye. It seems like a better example of storytelling and gag animation than previous shorts, continuing the progression from Alice’s Balloon Race and Alice’s Orphan.

The subject matter is a bit startling, actually, considering the times in which it was produced. The idea is that Alice and Julius are going to war with Pete and his army of mice, so the short opens with Julius trying to recruit friends to their cause. This leads to a cute gag with Julius pulling down the top of a house where an old man can’t hear him, so Julius can literally shove the words “War is declared” in the man’s earpiece.



But remember what was going on in 1926. It was the Roaring 20’s, but much of the country was still recovering from American involvement in World War I. There was much debate as to whether the US should ever involve itself in such a war again. It was somewhat of a war weary nation, so to produce a short with such a military bent is confusing to me.

However, the short goes full bore with its war imagery. Julius leads a parade of animals through the recruiting station, where they emerge on the other side in uniform and armed to go to battle.



Of course, the battle ensues, with Pete leading a battalion of Mickey-esque mice to fire cannons at Alice and her troops. There are some cute gags here, with the mice losing their cannon and hiring a donkey to kick the cannonballs at the opposition being one highlight. But there are more - Alice gets knocked down by a cannonball, Julius uses a stove as armor – all of which are better than what was seen only a few shorts back.



One of my favorites was seeing Julius get hit by a cannonball, and shattering to pieces. He is gathered up by a medic, then taken to the hospital, where a doctor reassembles him from the pieces and “spare parts” on the shelf. It’s an amusing sequence that stands out in this film.



Reassembled, Julius devises a plan. He places a piece of strong cheese at the entrance of a crevice, then uses a fan to blow the scent to the mice. He removes his tail and bashes each of them on the head, in a similar fashion to the fish back in Alice’s Day at Sea.



Of course, after eliminating the mice, Pete comes to call, but Julius is prepared. He gets Pete to chase him into a cannon, then escapes and shoots the bad guy off into the ether.

So what does this short tell us? Not much if you are looking at Walt’s life. It is interesting that this short features warfare, because Walt was in the Ambulance Corps during WWI, so he saw the horrors of war up close. Is that why this is the first of the shorts to feature war? Was the hospital scene a take off on those years? Without more evidence, we’ll never know, but that’s probably the most interesting thing to note about this well done short.

Alice's Orphan

If you have ever been a parent or tried to take care of very young children, you will be able to relate to Alice’s Orphan. I’ve read reviews of this short that say that it is not good, or somehow a bit off center, but to me, this was a continued demonstration of how the Disney studio was starting to find it s way in story telling, similar to Alice’s Balloon Race.

Part of the reason for that is that at this time in 1926, the animators were beginning to do more storyboarding. This is a common practice today in all films and television, but at the time, it was not done for animation. Animators merely made up a story and started drawing, but the addition of the storyboard made for a more focused cartoon.

This short opens with Julius out ice skating, on an open pond with several other cats. He sees a female cat that he is stricken with, but she soon falls in a crack in the ice. Julius rescues her, assuming that he will be thanked and win her heart. But when she gets up, he sees that she is ugly, and in a bit of a mean turn, shoves her back in the ice and closes the hole.



It’s a funny bit, but it’s contradictory to the rest of the short. That would be my only complaint about this cartoon. Soon after, a woman leaves a basket next to the ice, and Julius notices it. Turns out, it’s a baby cat, and Julius picks the baby up and decides to take it back to his cabin.



Alice makes her only appearance in the short as Julius enters the cabin to show her the baby, and they name the baby Oscar. Soon, Oscar does what babies do, and Julius has to change his diaper and give him a bath.

The bath sequence is inspired, especially if you’re a parent. Julius gets to do all the things that parents wish they could do. He runs Oscar up and down a washboard, strips his skin off, wrings him out like a towel, and finally pours ink down his throat to give Oscar the black coloring back. It’s funny, brutal and endearing all at the same time.



Next, it’s time for dinner, and Oscar digs in with vigor. He starts shoveling food in with his hands, prompting a rebuke from Julius. In a cute gag, he yells “Hey” and the word floating in the air redirects Oscar.



Not that it matters, as Oscar laughes at Julius’ proper manners, even throwing the turkey at his erstwhile father. That’s enough for Julius, who decides to send the kid off to bed. Again, this is a great sequence, as Julius tosses Oscar up in the air, dropping him into a set of pajamas, then throwing him in the bed. Like any kid, Oscar cries, until Julius begins rocking him and singing “Rock A Bye Baby.” After a couple of false starts, he gets Oscar to sleep and the short ends.



I have to say, the storytelling and the gags in this short are the best combination that I have seen in the last 10-12 Alice shorts. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that this was when the storyboarding process began.

Another interesting thing to note is the diminished role of Alice. At least in the last short, she was part of the balloon race, but here, all she does is say hello to Oscar, then disappear. It’s clear that the animators and Walt are no longer interested in the live action parts of these shorts, but instead are focusing on improving the animation.

Alice's Balloon Race

As 1926’s shorts roll along, I’m looking for signs of what is to come in the Oswald shorts and the Mickeys that will come later. I have not seen those cartoons before, except for a couple of the Mickeys, but I just want to see if there are familiar themes here that will be repeated later. Increasingly, though, what I’m seeing is that Julius is more like another cartoon character – Felix the Cat.

Alice’s Balloon Race is a good example of this. Where Julius started out as Alice’s companion who would do some fun gags here and there, in the later shorts, he increasingly dominates the screen, and pulls some of the same tricks that Felix does. Alice is merely a side character in her own short, and Julius and his Felix imitation take center stage.

This short has a fairly simple plot – Alice, Julius, Pete and some others are competing in a balloon race. Straightforward and easy to understand, right?



So, they begin the race, and of course, Pete cheats and knocks Alice and Julius out of the sky. After the crash landing, they can’t get their balloon back in the air, but Julius comes up with the idea of having a nearby hippo sneeze them back up. He pulls pepper out of nowhere (much like Felix and his magic bag) and forces the sneeze that propels them upward.



Once they are in the air, the balloon bounces around as bad weather sets in. Lightning terrorizes the balloon, separating the basket from the balloon, and creating a corkscrew effect that pops the balloon.



Once they hit the ground, Alice is done for the short, just over halfway through. Julius doesn’t give up, though, grabbing a dachshund, and attaching his thought balloons to either end. That doesn’t work, so after that crash, he inflates an elephant, after pulling a pump out of nowhere. As he gets up he grabs a bird and catches up to Pete.



The final scene on my copy is a bit muddled, but lightning again threatens Julius, chasing him off of the elephant-balloon, but Julius hitches a ride on the lightning and gets back to the balloon as the short ends.



I’m assuming that my copy is missing the ending, but all in all, it’s not a bad short. There are some entertaining gags as well as a story that moves through the entire short. The lack of appearance by Alice is not bad, because she has not been a factor in most of the recent shorts anyway.

What really stands out is how much Julius is becoming a copy cat, no pun intended. His ability to pull tools out of nowhere is a direct copy of Felix, and he even looks more like Felix in this short than in others. This runs counter to everything you think when you look at Disney animation. I’ve always thought that Disney was the innovator, but at this point in his career, although Ub has created some memorable gags and is pushing the quality of the animation, the characters are largely derivative. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s very interesting to note, since the later characters would be so original.

Alice on the Farm

As we begin 1926 in our review of the Disney films, it’s interesting to note what is going on behind the scenes during this timeframe. The year of 1925 was the most successful yet for the studio, as they released 15 Alice shorts, fully integrated Ub Iwerks into the team, cut costs by replacing Virginia Davis with Margie Gay, and signed a new contract for 18 Alice films with Margaret Winkler.

Because of this success, Walt and Roy felt it was okay to start looking at expansion. The Kingswell Avenue storefront where they had begun the Disney Brothers Studio was not sufficient to hold all the animators anymore, so they found a new place on Hyperion Avenue, where the studio would flourish until the proceeds from Snow White allowed the construction of the new Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

So, you can see that late 1925 and early 1926 was a busy time for the brothers. That is not to excuse the seeming repetition of gags that pops up in today’s short, Alice on the Farm, but you can understand why the focus was less on innovation at this time, and more on churning out the product.

Alice on the Farm is really a recycling of old gags, wrapped in a farm setting as opposed to some of the more exotic settings of earlier shorts. The opening of the short features a cow eating nearby flowers. Yep, it’s that exciting. The gags begin when one of the flowers starts moving, causing the cow to chase the flower up a tree to eat it.



Then we see the chicken house, where the chickens are partying in much the same manner that we have seen rats and other barnyard animals doing throughout the Alice shorts. Nearby, Alice instructs Julius to go and perform some chores.

For some reason, this causes Julius to go and get a dachshund out of its house, and he and the dog walk off towards the chores. At some point, though, the dog gets fleas, and Julius rigs up a rake to the dog’s tail to help it scratch. With that, the dog disappears.



This leads to a neat gag, where Julius forms his tail into a radio antenna, to communicate with the cow, that is still up in a tree. The cow also makes his tail into an antenna, and the two agree to meet, where we find out that Julius is to milk the cow. For some reason, though, it doesn’t work, until Julius finds a vacuum cleaner that he hooks up to the cow’s udder to suck the milk out. Don’t try this at home, kids.



About that time, Pete happens across Alice, and kidnaps her. In a repeat gag, Alice’s scream of help flies to Julius and drops on his head. At this point, the rest of the short unfolds in similar fashion to others. Julius puts a horse together from a sawhorse by stuffing a dog in one end. The horse even begins running backwards and Julius switches the head and tail, like he did in Alice Wins the Derby.



When he reaches Pete’s cabin, Julius bursts in, and sword fights the villain with his tail, before the tail loses its stiffness. After dipping the tail in a nearby bucket of starch, Julius has an idea, and dumps the starch on Pete, causing him to harden up like concrete. Julius punches him into a million pieces and accepts the thanks from Alice.



This short is entertaining, no doubt, but it’s nowhere near original. Most of the gags are recycled from other shorts. The use of Julius’ tail as a sword has been in many of the shorts, just like the words hitting people over the head. I mentioned the repeat from Alice Wins the Derby, and the dancing chickens, but there are many more. It really seems as though this short, like Alice in the Jungle, was cobbled together from ideas for other shorts, then put out as a way to get product out. We’ll have to wait and see if this approach changes as we move forward into 1926.

Alice in the Jungle

Sorry for the absence yesterday, some family issues took precedence, but I’m back today with our final film of 1925, Alice in the Jungle. And guess what? This short features the return of the original Alice – Virginia Davis! Well, not really, but let me explain.

Remember Alice Hunting in Africa? Well, Margaret Winkler hated the first draft of that short so much that the Disney team had to go back to the drawing board, literally, and redo the animation. It was in part the poor showing with this short that convinced Walt to go out and get Ub Iwerks to join the studio. Well, the short was eventually completed and released in 1924, but without using all of the live action footage shot.

So, along comes the end of 1925, and another Alice short is due. What to do but re-use that live action footage of Virginia Davis and create another Alice jungle themed short? So, Walt and his boys were able to create another short, without another live action shoot.

With that background, what did they come up with? Not much, to be honest with you. Although there are some great gags in this short, it lacks a cohesive story. You can tell that the animators were cramming in all their ideas while trying to find a way to incorporate the Alice footage they already had.



The short opens with Julius in the jungle, riding an elephant’s trunk, then taking off on a bird’s tail, before falling into a pool of crocodiles. This part is fairly dull, to be honest, because it mainly consists of typical reaction shots from Julius, and long range views of him wrestling with the crocs.



Somehow, the scene shifts to two elephants in a bathing pool, in a neat little sequence that has nothing to do with Julius or Alice. The elephants “unpack their trunks” by turning the long trunk into an actual trunk and pulling out their bathing suits, then antagonizing each other in the pool.



Cut back to the jungle, where a barber has set up shop, but a hippo comes by and eats his barber pole, thinking that it’s a peppermint. Julius comes to the rescue, though, starching up a tiger’s tail then breaking it off as a replacement.



Finally, about two thirds of the way through, Alice comes in, being antagonized by some weird looking animal, whom she chases into a cave. A lion chases her out, and her screams for help draw Julius, who fights the lion. In a scene reminiscent of the very first Alice short, a group of lions chase them, until Alice and Julius run onto a nearby elephant. The elephant begins flapping its ears and flying, but it’s tail is dragging. In a similar gag to Alice’s Tin Pony, Julius gets an idea, and uses his thought balloon to hoist the elephant’s tail as the short ends.



This short is very disjointed, and seems like a hodge podge of ideas, but that’s not to say that there are not good gags. Simply the appearance of a flying elephant about 20 years before Dumbo was done is significant. But you can see from looking at this that there was a reason why Walt would eventually insist that “story is king.” The key thing that has been present in the best Alice shorts is a good story, and the lack thereof has doomed those that did not have it.