Get Rich Quick

The evolution of Goofy as a lead character has been one of the most fun things to watch as I’ve been going through these shorts.  When you see the Dippy Dawg version of the Goof early on in his career, during the Mickey Mouse barnyard sequences, it’s hard to foretell the George Geef version that we see during the 1950s.  Becoming the every man, though, was a crucial element of Goofy’s evolution.  In Get Rich Quick, he’s experiencing something that we all have from time to time – the temptation to find an easy way to make money.

In the 1950s, getting rich quick didn’t mean creating a .com that you ended up selling for lots of money.  No, Goofy instead goes after wealth the only way he knows how – gambling.  The whole short is about how Goofy finds any way possible to gamble, no matter how big or how small.  It lends itself to some very inventive and cool gags, such as when Goofy emerges from an alley way dice game in a barrel, making you think he’s lost everything.  Instead, it turns out he needed the barrel to carry all the cash he won!

This is a short where the animators were clearly having some fun creating ways for Goofy to get into trouble with gambling.  There is a rather epic moment where Goofy confronts a slot machine that happens to be in his path.  Letting the slot machine take on the characteristics of a human being is an inspired choice that allows Goofy to face a real adversary instead of the figurative one of “gambling.”

The entire short contains gags that we have not seen in many years from the shorts.  Another example is the way that Goofy enters a poker game.  With all his cohorts gathered around a table, there’s a wall of cigar smoke floating up from the table.  Goofy manages to enter the fray by opening the smoke like a gate, then closing it behind him.  That sort of gag has been exceedingly rare ever since the early days of the Mickey shorts, but it shows what Disney’s crew could do when allowed to let their imaginations run a bit.

The final coup de grace, though, comes when Goofy gets home, and is confronted by his wife.  She is outraged to find him gambling, at least until he says that they can use all the money he won, which is promptly claimed by the wife.  The quick turnaround from yelling at the Goof to figuring out how she will spend the money is a stereotype, but a funny one.  It’s a great short from start to finish that really allows Goofy to inhabit the every man role and let the animators use some great visual gags to tell a great story.  In short?  It’s Disney.

R'coon Dawg

It’s a Mickey Mouse short!  The late 1940s and early 1950s have mainly brought us a slew of Donald and Pluto shorts, with the occasional Goofy thrown in for good measure, but today, we get a Mickey short.  It’s called R’Coon Dawg and it’s about Mickey Mouse…hunting raccoons?  This is a short about Mickey in the woods, and…it’s not really about Mickey at all.  It’s teased with a Mickey title page, but this is a Pluto short in disguise.

Mickey gets introduced early in the short, as a somewhat country sounding voice narrates the story of how hunters tromp through the woods to hunt.  But almost immediately thereafter we are introduced to his hunting dog, Pluto, who is sniffing out the scent of raccoons for Mickey to shoot.  It’s Pluto’s sense of smell, inf act, that provides the majority of the gags in this short.  If that sounds like a poor premise for a cartoon, you may be a regular reader of this site.

It means that Pluto spends most of the short chasing a non-existent raccoon that is a visualization of the raccoon’s scent.  That is very strange to start with, but gets weirder when Pluto spends his time chasing this scent and getting into all sorts of slapstick predicaments without actually seeing the raccoon.  Let me repeat that – he never actually sees the raccoon for most of the short.

When Pluto starts expanding his sniffing capabilities is when we get the very interesting gags.  Because this is the world’s smartest raccoon, Pluto catches the scent of a horse, a frog and more animals, and begins envisioning some amazing animal hybrids that drive him quite crazy.  This is the best moment of the short, where we get to see some very inventive stuff.

The final gag, too, is pretty good, as the raccoon gets away from Mickey (who reappears at the end) and Pluto by pretending to have a baby.  The baby turns out to be Mickey’s coonskin cap that the raccoon stole.  But it serves the purpose and gets the hunters to turn away.  So that’s two good gags in a seven and a half minute short.  The rest is typical Pluto slapstick humor, and that’s not enough to sustain the interest for the viewer.

How To Catch A Cold

From time to time, Disney made educational films or commercial shorts for companies that were willing to pay the money.  One such film produced in 1951 is How To Catch A Cold, where the Kleenex corporation asked Disney to demonstrate why using their products was such a good idea when fighting off a cold.  What they ended up with was a 10 minute film that uses some new characters to educate as only Disney can.

Watching this film, it felt like a flashback, but not to 1951, instead it seemed like a part of EPCOT Centeror some of the great Wonderful World of Disney shorts from Walt’s time.  The story focuses on the Common Man, a character that catches a cold and does so by doing many of the things our parents always told us about: working too much, exhausting himself, leaving drafty windows open, staying out in the rain and oh yeah, being around someone who has a cold.

It’s interesting to contrast that with what we know now about colds, which is that they are primarily contracted because of viruses.  There is some good info in this short, however, as presented by the other new character, Common Sense.  This is a miniature version of Common Man, with a voice that seems more Jiminy Cricket than anything else.  In fact, this whole short seems very much like what I remember from my school days, which showed the “I’m No Fool” series with Jiminy explaining similar things.

In this case, the subject of the cold is shown and painstakingly detailed as to what the Common Man did to contract the deadly disease.  As I watched, I felt my own throat start closing up.  It’s that convincing.  I really feel like Common Man should have given political speeches explaining complex policy.  Using the patented Disney formula of taking real world concepts and animating them in simple drawings, either X’s and O’s  to show germs or diagrams of houses to show how a cold spreads, the short methodically takes you through how it all works. 

Surprisingly, this is among the most entertaining shorts of 1951 so far. While the Donald and Goofy and Pluto shorts have been mostly rehashed versions of familiar tropes, this is something different. Sure, the subject matter is not something I would normally want to spend time pondering, but it is something I can relate to.  I imagine the same was true for many audiences at the time.  It also shows an evolution of Disney using animation to educate. It began with Victory Through Air Power and would continue through the excellent Man In Space series on the Disneyland TV show.  If you’re looking to see how that evolution worked, definitely check out How To Catch A Cold.

Nature's Half Acre

The True Life Adventure series is far from my favorite thing that Disney has ever done. However, it’s an important part of the Walt Disney legacy, and something that the company returns to over and over again. These films became such a part of the Disney lexicon that they would form the basis of Adventureland at Disneyland and become part of the Disneyland TV show. The previous entries in this series, Seal Islandand Beaver Valley, were of varying quality. With Nature’s Half Acre, I feel like Disney hit their stride.

Not identifying where it’s set, Nature’s Half Acre, in a similar way to the previous films, tracks the change of seasons in one set place. This time it’s a small plot of land where birds and bugs interact throughout the seasons. We begin the short in spring, where the various activities of the creatures is wound into a song called “Symphony of Spring” which was written for the short.  A woodpecker’s taps are integrated, as are the long crawls of an inchworm. Obviously these are set to music, but there’s a nice rhythm to the piece that serves as an easy intro to the subject.

Winston Hibler, the narrator of these True Life Adventure films, brings things right into focus after that, however, as the majority of the film focuses on the relationship between predator and prey. It begins with birds eating caterpillars, and grabbing food from other sources that they can feed to their young. Many of us have seen or heard of mother birds feeding their children in the nest, but seeing it here is a powerful image. It also allows us to find a narrative that was lacking so much in the previous films. By flowing from one animal to the next, we get a sense of place and character.

That warm and comforting image is then immediately undercut as we cut to scenes of everyone eating everyone else. That’s not me being snarky, that’s actually what Hibler calls it at the end of the sequence.  We have spiders eating bees, after we see the amazing inside of a beehive and how it looks.  We have preying mantis eating anything they can find. And of course the birds pick off all the week bugs.  No joke, the majority of the film is animals eating each other.

Things come full circle, though, as the film slides into winter, showing how the various creatures react to the oncoming frost.  Some build cocoons, others burrow into the earth, but they all prepare for the harsh winter.  These shots of the winter scenery are a stark contrast with the early vistas of spring that were so beautiful and inspiring. It also helps establish a narrative flow for the film, tracking the seasons.

When spring reveals itself again, it’s a rebirth for the creatures and the viewer.  The harsh realities of nature, with animals eating each other throughout the film, are forgotten.  The “Symphony of Spring” returns, this time holding more promise, because we know what the animals have gone through leading into spring. It’s that arc of character for the film that made Nature’s Half Acre more enjoyable.  While I’m still not a fan of the True Life Adventures, this one provided much more entertainment than previous editions.

Alice in Wonderland

When I sit down to watch Alice in Wonderland, it is a struggle.  As you may have deduced in reading this blog, I love stories and storytelling.  Alice is not a film that focuses on story.  It is a bizarre romp through colorful characters that meanders from one scene to the next, with barely a line of dialogue or visual to connect the scenes.  It makes for some amazing visual filmmaking that fails to tell a story.

The film ostensibly tells the story of Alice following the White Rabbit through a rabbit hole into Wonderland.  But the problem is, the White Rabbit is mostly absent during the course of the film.  The idea that this is what drives Alice becomes lost about halfway through the film, and leads to a wandering and lost Alice.  It’s a shame, because the work done by the animators here is very good, and the combination of visuals, music and voice acting is quite excellent.

Start with the visual feast that is Alice in Wonderland.  The imagination on display is fun to look at, and flows naturally from Mary Blair’s designs.  The brilliance of the flowers sequence, where the flowers sing “A Golden Afternoon” to Alice, is one of my favorite things in the entire film.  The use of puns on the bread and butterflies, the rocking horsefly and others supplements the whimsical designs and voices.  But anyone who has seen the film knows that two sequences stand out more than any other.

The mad tea party that is joined by the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse is probably the most recognizable sequence of the whole film.  Ed Wynn’s performance as the Mad Hatter was so memorable that he is the main character outside of Alice to appear as a character in the Disney parks.  It makes for a fun and very entertaining bit of film to watch them demolish cups, sing songs and do things that are physically impossible.  Alice’s astonishment and look of wonder is a stand in for the audience watching these proceedings and trying to figure out what is going on in this crazy world.

That’s the issue with the film, though, is that the audience spends most of their time trying to figure out what they should look at, where they are and what’s going on.  The place where this is the least applicable in the film is the very end, when Alice finds herself in the court of the Red Queen.  That sequence has a fairly straightforward flow – the queen gets upset about the roses, meets Aliceand engages in a cricket game.  When Alice gets sabotaged by the Cheshire Cat, she is sentenced to die and has to find a way out of that predicament.  It all flows one detail to the next.

Contrast that to the early scenes where Alice flows from floating in the ocean to the silliness of the caucus race to the confrontational nature of Tweedledee and Tweedledum and over to the Walrus and the Carpenter story.  All of that in about 15 minutes!  The film is schizophrenic to say the least.  What ends up making it memorable for me is the music.

Many don’t realize it, but this is the Disney film with the most songs.  The reason for that, as I wrote yesterday, is because the filmmakers wanted to pull in as much of the poetry from the Carroll books as they could.  What happens is many memorable songs, like “A Golden Afternoon,” “The Unbirthday Song,” “March of the Cards” and more.  These are songs that are played to this day at the Disney parks, and survive as great memories.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make Alice in Wonderland a good film.  The lack of narrative flow through and depth in the characters makes it ultimately a bizarre accumulation of visuals.  I honestly find it hard to watch until it gets to the tea party, and have trouble staying interested, which is not a problem I typically have with Disney films.  Even Walt acknowledged that Alicedid not turn out the way he wanted, and I have to say I agree with him.

Development of Alice in Wonderland

If you’ve been following the arc of Disney films since World War II, you’ve seen things evolve slowly.  In 1949, the company jumped into live action with So Dear To My Heart.  The magic of animated films began to resurface after all the package features with Cinderella in 1950.  And now, in 1951, Disney plunged forward with one of their most bizarre and experimental films, Alice in Wonderland.

Walt had been looking for ways to adapt this story for decades.  Remember that Walt got his start in animation with the Alice Comedies, where he took a live action Alice and dropped her in an animated world.  While he didn’t directly adapt Lewis Carroll’s books, it was using the strange settings and characters from the books that made such a crazed and dynamic world.  

When Walt got the idea to move into feature films, it was Alice in Wonderland that interested him.  The thought was to make a feature length version of the Alice Comedies, and a screen test was shot with actress Mary Pickford in 1933.  It turned out to be a bust when another studio released their live action version of the story.  But Walt was not deterred, and registered the title Alicein Wonderland with the MPAA in 1938.

 Mary Pickford

Like nearly every other project, the financial struggles of the 1940s put Aliceon the back burner.  Between the animator’s strike, the loss of foreign markets, the war and the financial failures of some of the pre-war films, Walt’s output had to turn to what made money moreso than what art they could produce.  Alicewas no exception.   After the war ended, Walt returned to the idea of producing a live action/animation hybrid.  Several actresses were tested for this version, including Ginger Rogers.

Ultimately, though, the decision was made in the late 1940s to turn to a musical, comedic take on the books with less of a focus on slavish devotion to the story.  This was the version of the film that was released to theatres in 1951.  For years, Disney animators had tried to recreate the illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, the man who had done iconic drawings for the Carroll books.  With this new freedom, the artists created their own versions of the characters, and ended up defining the look of these characters for generations. The biggest key to this was Mary Blair, who had been such a key on the South American films.  Her design was applied to the backgrounds and art direction of the film, making it very unique in the Disney canon.

Mary Blair's designs

Rather than stick to the poetry and verse that Carroll had put in the books, Disney commissioned songwriters to use those poems as a starting point for new songs.  The film ended up with tons of songs, some of them only lasting for seconds, because they were there to simply use the story beats from the books.  The changes were not popular with fans of the books, something that Disney expected.

Kathryn Beaumont, who would go on to do much more work at Disney, was chosen as the voice of Alice, and a variety of character actors and comedians were picked to round out the looney cast.  Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter turned in the most memorable performance, but former Disney faves Jerry Colonna as the White Rabbit and Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat also turned in fan favorite performances. 

Kathryn Beaumont with Walt

In the end, the public reacted rather unfavorably to the film.  While it wasn’t the financial disaster that some other films like Fantasia were upon initial release, the film never found its footing and made less than $3 million in theatres.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that audiences got to see Aliceagain, but this time, it was much more a part of the counter culture than a family film.  Once again, in later years, when Alice was released on video, the audiences started flocking to it, and recognizing the work done in the 1950s.  Tomorrow, we’ll look at the film itself and how it holds up as a work of art.

Lucky Number

Crazy to say, but it has been quite some time since we have seen Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie in a short.  With Lucky Number, that changes, and in the best possible way.  As we all know by know, Donald is the absolute best when he is being irritated and the boys do that better than anyone else does.  In this case, though, they’re trying to help him, which is a nice change on the formula.

The nephews are working with Donald at a service station, which is a full service gas station for all you youngsters out there.  In the old days, rather than just let you pump your own gas and buy Cheetos, the gas station attendants could change your oil, pump your gas and even bring you a drink.  That’s what we see Donald and his nephews engaged in as the short begins.  But Donald has to be distracted because he has a raffle ticket for a brand new car.  Unfortunately, when the radio announces the winner, it’s 341, not 342 like the ticket Donald is holding.

While he storms off, however, the nephews listen to the announcer correct himself, and it turns out Donald did win the car.  Rather than go tell him, however, they decide to go get the car and surprise him.  Thus begins the futile struggles of Donald’s nephews to keep moving and surprise Donald without driving him nuts.  First, it’s that they don’t have any gas in the car they rebuilt to go get the raffle winnings.  Then, they have to try and convince Donald to give them gas by dressing their lousy car up like the new car and dressing one of the boys up like a vivacious female duck!

It’s all very silly, but that’s the fun of it.  What I love about it is how the nephews are so persistent in their efforts, in the face of Donald’s dogged persistence to deny them.  There’s a very cool sense of irony to the whole thing, because Donald doesn’t realize that the boys are really trying to help him, and he’s hindering them at every turn.  It’s a unique twist on the formulaic nature of these shorts, where the boys are battling Donald all the time.

When they finally get the car home to Donald, he’s so mad that they fooled him with the fake car that he destroys the real one.  Yes, he overinflates the tires, pours tar on it, floods it and crushes it against the ceiling of the garage.  The scene of Donald attacking his own good fortune is hysterical, as the boys plead with him not to do it.  It’s not until the radio announcer mentions that he hopes Donald is enjoying his new car that the poor duck realizes what he’s done.  The whole inversion of the typical Donald formula is what makes Lucky Number so good.  This is one that stands out as one of Donald’s best.

Tomorrow We Diet

We have the return of George Geef, the every day man form of Goofy, in Tomorrow We Diet.  There is nothing that we can relate to more than the struggles of dieting.  I’m sure almost everyone reading this has been through it, and it becomes a part of suburban life.  I’m sure many Disney animators had tried dieting at this point in their lives, and it ends up being one of the funniest of the George Geef shorts.

The Goof in this short does not look like the Goofy of old.  He is more rotund around the middle, does not have his typical ears and hat, and is generally speaking more human like.  When he walks in front of the mirror, that’s when the fun begins.  The Geef in the mirror begins pointing out to the Geef in the real world that he is fat.  The back and forth between the two is the basis for the rest of the short.  It’s a good way to play off the trick of the omniscient narrator from the How To shorts.

Despite the mirror’s protestations, it takes a strange turn of events for Geef to figure out that he really is overweight.  The thought put into this sequence is astounding, because it builds throughout and ends in a perfect joke.  Geef has to use the tarp from the tailor shop as a suit, causes a taxi to get flats and breaks an elevator because he’s so overweight, but it’s not until he steps on a novelty scale that he realizes there is a problem.  It’s the little slip of paper with his fortune that gets Geef to realize the issue.  That is hilarious.

When he returns home and starts getting serious about the diet, it’s the man in the mirror who advises him.  Again, it’s a brilliant twist.  All of us have tried to lose weight and listen to the voice in our head when we do it.  In this case, that voice is given dimension through the picture in the mirror.  Just like our own internal voices, though, the Geef in the mirror doesn’t always give the best advice.  He keeps saying that Geef should wait and not eat, forcing him to lock up the food.

The struggle to not eat at night is one any dieter is familiar with, so watching Goofy go through it as he sees things turn into food all around him.  The artistry of the quick cuts from furniture, drapes and more turning into food and back to Goofy’s panicked face is amazing.  The ultimate kicker is when Goofy finally gets to sleep, he is awakened by the man in the mirror eating all the food!  It’s then that the immortal line, “Tomorrow we diet!” is spoken, summarizing the thoughts of all of us.  That makes this short one that translates from a simple gag reel to a great relatable short for all of us.

Test Pilot Donald

Ah, Chip and Dale, you always know how to get under Donald’s skin.  In Test Pilot Donald, though, the chipmunk finally find a reason other than food to oppose the duck.  It makes this feel fresh and new compared to the other Donald Duck shorts, with great gags that add to the legend around the conflicts between them. 

My favorite gag in the entire short is how it opens.  Remember, the title of the short is Test Pilot Donald.  So it opens with a shot of Donald pulling up on the control stick, then quick cuts of the plane going toward the ground.  Back and forth it goes between Donald struggling to pull the plane out of the dive and the scenes of the plane heading toward the ground.  Then, as the plane pulls up safely, we get to see the real story – Donald is flying a model airplane, and seated safely in a chair on the ground. 

That gag sort of sets the tone for what turns out to be a very funny short.  Once the plane ends up landing in Chip and Dale’s tree, Dale decides to jump in and check out the toy from the inside.  You can see where this might be going.  In what may be the most detailed model plane ever, Dale takes flight, and is able to counteract Donald’s remote control with the switches and controls inside the model.  Watching them struggle back and forth is hilarious.

Even once they land the plane, the fun doesn’t stop.  We get to see Dale under the hood of the plane, trying to fix it from the crash landing.  I laughed out loud to see Donald handing him a tiny wrench during this sequence.  Where did the little wrench come from?  And it took Donald a full minute to figure out that he was helping the chipmunk rather than chasing him off.  That’s the kind of ignorance that serves Donald best as a character.

The kicker is finally seeing Donald get what’s coming to him when the plane chases him around the woods.  It’s the kind of wacky, fast paced action we saw in the beginning of the Disney shorts, but was lacking from recent efforts.  Chip and Dale sitting in their tree and watching Donald get flown around in circles is the closing shot of the short and it’s quite funny.  This is one that makes me laugh from start to finish, and something you should definitely watch.

Plutopia

I was remarking to someone earlier in my review of the 1951 shorts that they all seemed very stale.  There was nothing new or exciting, which is somewhat disappointing considering what would be forthcoming.  After all, Alicein Wonderland is right around the corner, and that’s definitely different.  Things like Sleeping Beauty and other films were coming soon as well.  So why wasn’t that sort of experimentation showing up in the shorts?

As of Plutopia, we see something completely different than what we have experienced before.  Early on, though, it doesn’t appear that way.  The sort opens just like any other Disney short and seems normal.  It shows a freshly designed Mickey driving Pluto out into the middle of the woods to a cabin for a vacation.  This is a familiar set up and made me feel like we were in for more of the same.  Even the appearance of a cat adversary seems fairly routine.

And as it unfolds, the routine short is what you get until about halfway.  As Mickey discovers that there is a strict “no dogs allowed” policy in the cabin, he is forced to put Pluto outside and put him on a muzzle.  The cat comes back by to exact revenge by taunting Pluto and eating his food before nuzzling down next to the dog.  It’s after Pluto falls asleep that the real fun begins, however.

Immediately, we are transported away from the solid backgrounds and fully drawn figures of the real world and into an abstract world of dreams – Plutopia.  The backgrounds disappear into a wall of solid colors.  The shapes are mere color lines that form the idea of a doghouse or a pole.  It’s abstract animation at its core.  This is something we’ve seen in Dumbo, but not in the shorts.  It’s a crazy, fun and inspired departure from the typical Disney filmmaking.

The dreamscape is where Pluto can escape from reality, as you’d expect.  The cat develops the ability to speak, begs for Pluto to bite him and feeds Pluto steaks, bones, and more.  It is a wonderful change of pace from what we have seen prior to this.  Even once Pluto wakes up, I wanted to just go back to Plutopia and see the amazing art continue on and on, with more crazy backgrounds and new ideas.  It’s fantastic to see, and one that I could watch over and over again.

Cold War

George Geef returns to the screen in Cold War, wherein Goofy takes on the common cold.  In case you’ve forgotten, George Geef is Goofy’s “human” persona, where he takes on the characteristics of a typical suburbanite to show the humor inherent in every day situations.  It’s Goofy’s latest evolution to being the “common man” that can demonstrate this kind of humor.  What’s more relatable than the common cold?

There is a ton of truth in this short, to the point that it makes it less funny than a normal Goofy short.  That is not a criticism, as it’s a more subtle humor than we are used to from Goofy.  If you watched his last short, Home Made Home, which was full of slapstick gags, then went to this one, you’d be in for a surprise.  It’s almost a completely different character.  George Geef is us, whereas Goofy is the guy we always laugh at when he messes up.  It’s a small but important difference.

This short focuses on the immense discomfort that a cold causes in all of us when it comes on suddenly.  We get to see the trial of trying to swallow a cold pill when your throat is swollen shut from a cold.  We see the inability to get warm, stay cool or either when you suffer from a horrid fever.  And we see the lack of concern from Geef’s wife transfer immediately into overdrive to help, becoming an annoyance in the process.  We have all been there before.

It’s the exaggeration of these every day moments that makes the short so entertaining.  The pill gag is not my favorite, but it’s definitely something I can relate to.  I’ve definitely been sick before and tried to get others to understand that to no avail.  Not my wife, mind you, who’s a delightful woman and lets me sleep when I’m sick, but co-workers and others.  It’s one of those shorts that cuts close to home and touches the viewer in a different place.

In the end, Cold War comes off well, but it’s not the uproariously funny Goofy short that the “How To” shorts provided.  It’s a more mature short, that relies on the viewer being a grown up.  This one is not one we will see replayed on Disney Channel or online, because it’s not relatable for kids, since they don’t go to work or deal with wives.  For the rest of us, though, it’s a fun distraction from the daily grind that George Geef deals with, just like we do.

Corn Chips

Donald versus the chipmunks has, at this point in Disney’s history, become a standby for the animation team.  And somehow, it always revolves around food.  Chip and Dale are looking for something to eat, Donald has it, and hilarity ensues.  Eventually it all comes back to this, and the excitement is in seeing how they pull it off.  Are there new gags?  Does the interaction between the three entertain more or less than other chipmunk shorts?

With Corn Chips, the food item in question is popcorn and the answer to the above questions is a definite yes.  The popcorn actually adds a dynamic element to the short, leaving this one with lots more movement and fun than other recent Chip and Dale shorts.  It even starts with a great gag of both Donald and the chipmunks trying to shovel their respective driveways.  Donald’s is of course his actual driveway, while Chip and Dale try to shovel the branch above that very same driveway.  Donald manages to trick them into doing his walk simply by picking them up on a shovel and changing where they’re shoveling.

The fun really gets going, though, when the chipmunks discover the wonder of popcorn.  This is a short that brings back memories, as it shows Donald popping actual corn kernels over a fire, which some of us may be old enough to remember.  Before the microwave, this is how we popped popcorn, kids!  It definitely took me back to childhood while watching this, especially the sense of wonder that Chip and Dale had as they viewed the transformation between kernels to popped corn.

The ensuing fight over the popped kernels follows a fairly predictable path, with Chip and Dale running out of Donald’s house with the popcorn and the Duck chasing them trying to get it back.  There are some new things here, though, like the chipmunks tying up the popcorn in a little ball in Donald’s hat and turning it into a football.  Watching them run up and down the driveway and toss the “football” back and forth while some collegiate pep band music played was the laugh out loud moment of the short.

That said, then there was the obligatory Donald chasing them up their tree and out onto a shaky limb.  That’s okay, as it ends up with a fun climax of Donald trying to smoke the chipmunks out which only turns into an opportunity for them to pop an insane amount of popcorn on the fire he provided.  The end shot of popcorn surrounding a despondent Donald Duck is a fine example of how these shorts work.  The two parties are fighting back and forth, but in the end, it’s Donald’s arrogance and lack of forethought that undoes him.  That’s a winning formula.

Home Made Home

The Goof returns to the Disney shorts in Home Made Home, this time returning to the “How To” formula while building his own home.  It’s another step in Goofy’s evolution into the every man.  While most of us have not built our own home, anyone who owns a home can relate to the struggles of trying to repair or improve things around the house.  I believe I’ve actually done some of the things Goofy is faced with here.  I’m not sure I did as well as he did. 

Goofy’s humor has always been based around his bumbling attempts to carry out tasks that the rest of us have tried or at least thought about trying.  The home building is a take on that with an omniscient narrator as we’ve seen in countless other of Goofy’s shorts.  The formula is tweaked a bit, because a large portion of the short is focused on fun gags with Goofy on screen, without the narrator.  In those portions, it’s a fabulous sort of silent cartoon, because Goofy doesn’t speak for most of the short.

This is where the animators get to use Goofy’s limber and pliable form to its fullest.  Seeing his limbs flop around as he attempts to put in a window, nail up supports or perform other tasks related to building a home from scratch.  You have to hand it to the story team on this one, as the premise alone is enough to put a smile on your face.  Of all the Disney characters, who’s the one you’d most like to watch building something?

My favorite piece of the film is when Goofy is trying to install a window into the frame of the house.  The unwieldy glass teeters and totters through Goofy’s hands, which is so true to life if you’ve ever tried to install a window.  It’s a classic comedic piece with gags galore, including the classic of the window shifting and the Goof not realizing there is nothing there.  It’s no spoiler to say that the glass ends up shattered.  How it happens is the true fun of the short.

The big shift in the Disney shorts from the 1930s to the late 1940s and early 1950s is the move of the characters from the slapstick barnyard humor to suburban gags that have a little more to them.  That is not a slam on those old cartoons, which I enjoy a great deal, it’s just that it’s different.  You would not have seen Goofy trying to create a home 15 years earlier.  Now, a more mature group of animators is creating different shorts, and watching that evolution is part of what I love about doing this blog.