It is Mickey Mouse's 88th birthday today and as a tribute, we are going to look at one of my all time favorite Mickey cartoons, Mickey's Good Deed.
This film was from 1932, at this time, Mickey was at the absolute height of his popularity. He was famous in a way that no cartoon character before had ever been. Critics often compared his popularity to that of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, and like that character Mickey had fans of all types. He was equally popular with intellectuals and small children. In fact this same year Walt Disney would receive a special Academy Award for creating Mickey. Renowned director Sergei Eisenstein (best known for his silent film The Battleship Potemkin) was a huge fan and even wrote essays on Walt Disney, that discussed the brilliance of Mickey Mouse cartoons (He would remain a huge Disney fan and even later call Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the single greatest film ever made). Almost every other American cartoon studio was copying what Disney had done with Mickey Mouse. Characters like Foxy (at Warner Brothers) and Cubby Bear (at Van Beuren) were extremely thinly disguised copies of Mickey himself. In fact in 1931, the Van Beuren studio was sued by Walt for using two mice characters that looked exactly like Mickey and Minnie. There was no doubt, Mickey was movie royalty.
Mickey did for animated comedies, exactly what Charlie Chaplin's little tramp had done for live action comedies. Like the comedy films made before Chaplin, the animated comedies before Mickey were often very funny, but you very rarely felt any other emotional response to what was happening on screen. Mickey changed all that and nowhere was it clearer than in Mickey's Good Deed. In this film Mickey and Pluto are poor but happy as they perform Christmas carols on the street. A young rich boy in a mansion nearby is not satisfied with any of the many toys his father gives him. The boy sees Pluto outside his window and decides he wants that dog. The butler offers Mickey a lot of money for Pluto, but the mouse refuses to sell. Later Mickey comes across a poor family. The father is in jail and the mother can't afford any Christmas presents for her children. Mickey feeling sorry for the kids sells Pluto to the rich kid in order to buy presents for the kids. You may notice that this doesn't sound like your typical cartoon short of the era, and my point is it isn't. This film while not sacrificing the slapstick comedy, also adds a lot of drama to the story itself. However the Disney studio understood exactly what Chaplin had found out earlier. If the comedy and the drama are both driven by the story and characters, they can both easily co-exist. This idea is done to absolute perfection in this cartoon. This is a beautiful and moving film, while it never forsakes the comedy.
On top of that the film is also helped by a great look. The visuals are as beautiful as you would expect from 1930's Disney animation. The backgrounds are gorgeous, and the character animation is fantastic. It is sad that there are so many colorized copies around because, the black and white lighting is very beautiful as well.
This cartoon was directed by Burt Gillett, who Disney fans probably know best for directing the classic Silly Symphonies cartoon The Three Little Pigs (released the very next year). The animators on this film included many Disney legends. The animators were Les Clark, Clyde Geronimi, Dick Lundy, Ben Sharpsteen, Norm Ferguson, Johnny Cannon, Hardie Gramatky, and Frenchy DeTremaudan. Les Clark would later become one of Walt's nine old men. Norm Ferguson was the animator who really defined the character of Pluto (most notably in 1934's Playful Pluto) and would also be the supervising animator for the evil queen (in hag form) in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ben Sharpsteen would later direct Pinocchio and Dumbo, as well as produce most of the studio's live action nature documentaries of the 1950's. Clyde Geronimi would later be one of the co-directors for such feature films as Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians. And as many of you may know Walt himself voiced Mickey here. All in all a great crew to work on a great cartoon.
Happy birthday Mickey.
-Michael J. Ruhland
Resources Used
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons by Leonard Maltin
The Disney Villain by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson
Disney by Sergei Eisenstein
http://www.jbkaufman.com/movie-of-the-month/opening-night-1932
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023215/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast
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