Perfect cast and a good story

one of my absolute favorites!

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Alice Rattled by Rats (1925) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Fun entry in the series has Alice leaving her home and telling Julius to keep an eye on it. Sure enough, as soon as she leaves a large group of rats show up to have some fun and it's up to the cat to try and get them out of the house. ALICE RATTLED BY RATS certainly isn't the best film in the series but it contains enough good moments to make it worth viewing for fans. I think the highlight is just the frantic speed at which that rats are running around the house and causing all of the trouble. The problem with all of it is that none of it is overly funny and in the end that's the most damaging thing to the picture. Still, the animation is good as is the early live action.

The cartoon begins with Alice leaving in her car and telling the cat to guard the house against mice. Almost immediately the place is invaded by mice--and not the cute Mickey Mouse types! It's moderately funny and the animation is about average for the era--but certainly not a particularly memorable short.Considering that Felix the Cat had debuted in 1919, I can only assume that Walt Disney and this staff were deliberately trying to capitalize on his fame by making the cat in this cartoon look almost exactly like him. "Alice Rattled by Rats" is one of many Alice cartoons Disney made before branching off with his own studio in the late 1920s. And, like the other Alice cartoons, Alice is a real child and the of the cartoon and props are all created using simple black & white animation. There are music and sound effects and these must have been added later, as such things were not used until later in the decade...and often cartoons created before then were later retrofitted with sound to make them more marketable in the post-silent age.

Despite the elevated view held by many of all the works of Walt Disney, this early production has numerous flaws.SPOILERSFirst, the "ground-breaking" mixed live-and-animated work consists of "Alice" standing to one side and her cat -- looking and behaving very much like Felix the Cat -- on the other side, having a conversation. Then the cat changes his tail into a rifle (a typical Felix trick, converting his black tail into some other black object) and goes into the house, where he falls into a vat of Alice's home brew. Yes, that's right, this little girl is a bootlegger. After that, the cat has other problems, which it continues to solve in Felix-like methods, until he finally blows up Alice and himself.All in all, rather dull. The gags are interpolated with no regard to character or style. True, it lacks some of the barnyard humor that Iwerks put into early Mickey Mouse cartoons, but that vat of hootch disturbs me....