They can’t all be winners. Honestly animation as a medium was still finding its footing in 1931, and a lot of the shorts made in that year simply weren’t . . . what’s the word . . . good. Over at Warners—still at the time Harman and Ising—they were still soundly in the Bosko years, and the most noteworthy release of the year was “Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land,” the earliest of the Censored Eleven. Fleischer didn’t have Betty Boop or Popeye yet, much less Superman; they had the mostly forgotten Talkartoons and Screen Songs that year. And Disney . . . had this.
Mickey is floating away on the sea, apparently having been shipwrecked before the short started. He’s in a chipper mood regardless. He is using what appears to be a pair of Minnie’s bloomers as a sail, which we’ll ignore for now. He finally uses a swordfish to push him to shore on a deserted island. There are bananas, but also there is a very large spider. He sees a chest wash ashore that turns out to have a piano in it, because why not. Then there’s a gorilla, because gorillas sell, I guess.
Apparently this short exists at all because theatres were demanding another Mickey cartoon. A few bits of its animation were lifted in their entirety from other cartoons. There’s not a lot happening, and not a lot of what does happen is very funny. Several sequences go on seconds longer than there’s any reason to have happen. It’s seven minutes and drags quite a lot.
Wilfred Jackson had never directed a cartoon before, and it wouldn’t have been at all surprising if, after this, he’d never directed again. However, he did say that it left him certain he would never direct anything that didn’t feel like Disney again. Certainly he directed other things for the studio. “The Old Mill” would win Best Animated Short, deservedly, and his experiences as a sequence director starting with Snow White would eventually lead to being a director on movies such as Cinderella and my dad’s favourite, Lady and the Tramp.
In a way, it’s amazing where everyone prominently involved with this cartoon ended up. Jackson, of course, and Walt. Mickey, arguably, who wouldn’t be in Jackson’s part of Fantasia (he directed “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria”) but would be in it and is one of the most recognizable characters in animation. Composer Frank Churchill, who would go on to win an Oscar for the score of Dumbo and should’ve won for “Baby Mine” if there were any justice. Then again, from this cartoon, there wasn’t much of anywhere to go but up.
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