Alice and Julius
Alice, of course, was not an animated character but Julius the Cat was.
In fact, Julius may be considered Disney's first regularly recurring animated
character. In both attitude and the magical way that he used his body and
other objects he mainly resembled another popular animated cat named Felix.The
resemblance to Felix is not accidental, but to fair to Disney it was not
his idea. The "suggestion" came from Charles B. Mintz who had taken over
the management of the Winkler enterprise, since Winkler was the common distributor
of both Disney and Pat Sullivan (this shows that the movie industry is,
if nothing else, imitative). The resemblance wasn't lost on Sullivan either,
and he definitely was not amused; Sullivan fell on Mintz like a ton bricks
and and Margerite Winkler had to come out of retirement to smooth things
over. But the damage had been done and Sullivan left Winkler at the end
of 1924 and signed with Erle Hammons at Educational Pictures; but that's
another story. As for Disney he re-designed Julius for all the following
episodes so Julius looked more like the creations from the Fables Studios.
(Apparently Paul Terry was more accomodating; in later years, Disney admitted
that Terry was his model for his animation approach.) Julius was always
Alice's cat, though and his lifespan did not extend beyond the life of the
Alice comedies.