Disney's "Alice"

I gave my wife the perfect Christmas present this year – the complete "New Yorker" on DVD. In return, she gave me a DVD called "The Complete WEIRD Cartoons". These are actually treasures of early animation, but obviously they're being marketed towards people with no taste or sense of history.

I've only watched the first one, an early Disney "Alice" short. I had heard that they were not that great, but I never realized just how far from good they were. Julius, Alice's cat, isn't simply based on Felix – he's an example of shameless plagiarism. His personality, the way he's animated, his predilection for using his tail as all sorts of things (in this case a whip) is stolen wholesale from Messmer's work. And it's done with less style and animation savvy. Hard to believe W.E.D. started out as a hack.

This particular cartoon was "Alice's Egg Plant" and is notable for showcasing Disney's conservative politics and also a weird foreshadowing of the Disney animators' strike of the '40s (Alice's hens go on strike thanks to the efforts of a communist agitator sent by Moscow). You can also see the difference between the midwestern farm-boy Walt and the more cosmopolitan Messmer. The latter's Felix is a jazz age playboy and Messmer's imagination is also more European somehow (then again, so is Winsor McCay's). Meanwhile, Disney set "Plane Crazy" and "The Band Concert" on farms. Maybe I'm reading too much into this.