On the one hand, the point to having a semi-sentient dog do the work is that you don’t have to supervise it as closely. At least, I figure that’s the case. Some of the stuff they have Pluto do in these cartoons is stuff he’s not actually all that well equipped for. An example in this short is that someone has left a note saying that they’re on vacation, but Pluto can’t read. There’s a similar problem here with the fact that he’s treated as a dog when convenient and expected to be trustworthy like a person when convenient, and that doesn’t seem fair.

In this one, Pluto is delivering milk in a town in The Netherlands. He’s in love with Dinah the Dachshund again. He’s doing what he can to impress her, and they cavort around together. Unfortunately, Dinah gets her leg caught in the rope attached to the bell the town uses for alarm in case something goes wrong with the dike. Pluto frees her but appears, when the town responds, to have been pulling the rope as a deliberate false alarm. He and Dinah are both chased out of town—only to discover that there really is a hole in the dike. They must save the town by persuading them that it isn’t a prank.

If the rope is low enough and long enough and flexible enough to get wrapped around a dachshund’s leg, it’s a bad rope for its purposes. Also, I’m not an expert on the subject of earthworks and land reclamation and what have you, but from what little I do know, if there’s a hole large enough to put an actual dog into, that’s already at risk of failure. It’s going to take a whole lot of construction, not just patching a hole. There’s going to have been evidence long before then. The story of the boy with his finger in the dike was invented in the US by someone who’d never been to The Netherlands until after the story was published.

I mean, I know I’m not supposed to be thinking about that sort of thing. I’m not supposed to be thinking about any of the kind of details I’m thinking about here. However, as has likely become obvious by this point, Pluto cartoons leave me without much else to talk about except what’s wrong. It’s not enormously funny. I guess the scenes with Pluto and Dinah are cute enough, and I guess Pluto’s plan to rescue the town is clever enough, but I’m left thinking things like, “Wait, why is he sitting in the pail of milk?”

Also I suspect that it’s relying on stereotypes of the Dutch that just . . . no one cares anymore? Wooden shoes, okay, and the long braids, and honestly I’m not sure the average American really has a stereotype of The Netherlands these days until they’re reminded that it’s where Amsterdam is, and then they do not imagine the kind of bucolic atmosphere we see here. Maybe this is set long enough ago that the nineteenth century aura is appropriate, but it almost feels as though the short expects audiences to think the country is still like this. Our perception is simply not this.

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