Plutopia Part 3

At studios like Warner Bros. or Lantz, the only films made were shorts. While animators were always changing studios, it still led to a certain amount of consistency from film to film. One of the interesting things about Disney is that the shorts were often used as a holding tank for feature animators between assignments. A cartoon like Mickey's Delayed Date consisted almost entirely of animators from the shorts department, but on Plutopia, there are several animators who worked predominantly on features: Les Clark, Fred Moore, Marvin Woodward and Norm Ferguson.

This led to a real difference in the quality of the Disney shorts. This cartoon is better animated than Mickey's Delayed Date due to the skills of the crew. Director Nichols takes advantage of this. He clearly casts Plutopia by sequence, with the exception of giving Moore the lion's share of Mickey scenes.

It's interesting to see how Moore's style changed from a cartoon like The Nifty Nineties. Mickey's snout is larger than in the earlier cartoon and his head is smaller in relation to his body. Moore's poses are still highly personal, but I don't think that his timing is quite as sharp as in earlier cartoons. There's sometimes a tendency for his characters to float between poses and they occasionally do here.

Scene 21 is credited to Ferguson, but it looks to me like Moore did Mickey in that shot and Ferguson only handled the dog.

One excellent piece of Ferguson's animation is Pluto lying down on the mat in scene 30, where he goes down in stages, each part of his body timed separately. It's a very funny piece of motion.

I wonder what Ferguson's drawings looked like in the '50's? There are published examples of his Pluto from the 1930's, but I don't think I've seen later examples. The thing that strikes me about Ferguson's version of Pluto in this cartoon is that it doesn't have a strong sense of design. I think that George Nicholas's version of Pluto is far more attractive looking. Ferguson's drawing also handicaps scene 31, where Pluto floats away in his dream. It's a tough scene due to the changes in size and perspective, but Ferguson (or his assistant) wasn't up to it. There is also some bumpy timing in that shot.

Ferguson was a supervising animator on Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Does anybody know what he did on those films? I'm curious if Ferguson's drawing is noticeable on those features.

I've yet to see anything Les Clark animated that doesn't impress me. Clark gets the initial part of the dream sequence, where the characters' relationships are nailed down. Pluto is initially in revenge mode, taking sadistic pleasure from tripping the cat. The cat is remorseful and begs to be punished. This is all personality animation and Clark does a great job of putting the emotions across and establishing the dream's version of the cat.

George Nicholas draws a beautiful Pluto and has a real talent for strong, cartoony poses. Take a look at these:



His shapes are very flexible and he uses a lot of drag on the fleshy parts of the cat, which results in a beautiful looseness. Until the 1950's, Nicholas was mainly a shorts animator but he did get his chance to animate on features like Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp. I hope that we can identify more Nicholas work on the shorts, as I think that he's deserving of more attention.

Marvin Woodward brings up the rear, taking care of the transition from the end of the dream back to reality. By the time Woodward's scenes appear, all the heavy lifting has been done and Woodward's scenes have no surprises to deliver. Ferguson gets the final fight scenes and Moore finishes up the cartoon with Mickey.

Note the changes in background colors, keyed to the cat's emotional shifts. This is the kind of thing that Clampett did in the later Warner cartoons and it's interesting to see Disney picking up on it. The dream background sets and props are also very much in a UPA vein. Disney had no problem going with a graphic approach in a dream sequence here as they had done in the Pink Elephants dream in Dumbo.

Once again, I'm at a loss to know why this cartoon doesn't get more attention. Besides the outrageous content, there's excellent animation here and some bold, attractive graphic backgrounds. I think that this cartoon is an under-rated gem and if you haven't seen it, I hope that you'll seek it out.

Plutopia Part 2

There's always been a streak of outrageousness in animation. It goes back at least as far as the 1920's, when N.Y. animators from different studios collaborated on a porno cartoon called Buried Treasure that screened at a testimonial dinner for Winsor McCay. In the early talkie period, before the Hays Code clamped down, there was no shortage of sex gags, ethnic gags and gay gags in cartoons.

Once the Hays Code kicked in around 1934, all Hollywood movies including cartoons got tamer. Sex was particularly taboo. While there were performers with gay personas like Franklin Pangborn, their gayness was portrayed as fussiness and affectation. It was out of the question that they could interact with other men on a romantic or sexual basis.

Under the Hays Code, animated lust turned into exhuberance. Avery's wolf is the best example of this. The gags were built on visual variations of arousal, but consummation was out of the question. It's doubtful that Avery could have gotten away with even this except that there was a war on and the Hays office loosened up for the sake of national morale.

After the war, things got even tamer than before. Racial caricatures pretty much disappeared except for Speedy Gonzales. Bugs Bunny cross dressed, but that was done to showcase his antagonist's stupidity or neediness. Avery moved from sex to other topics.

The Disney studio's position was probably tamer than most. While there were some sexy girls in Disney films in the 1940's (Sluefoot Sue in Pecos Bill; the girl in Duck Pimples; Donald chasing live girls in The Three Caballeros), by the '50's it was back to classic stories and talking animals.

So where did Plutopia come from? And how did it escape without anybody seeming to notice? If you're not familiar with this cartoon (and I hate to spoil it for you), in Pluto's dream the cat is portrayed as a gay masochist who gets off when Pluto bites his tail. Pluto is happy to oblige as he's rewarded with bones (the phallic imagery is inescapable). Pluto and the cat are both receiving the oral gratification they crave.

Was the Hays office asleep at the switch? They never would have let a live actor portray masochism in anything other than a film set in an asylum. Did Walt Disney understand what this cartoon was really about? And where did the idea come from? It's completely atypical in Charles Nichols' directing career. It doesn't appear that there was anybody new on the crew who might be responsible.

Was it the result of somebody's repressed life surfacing or did somebody decide to see how much they could get away with? How much did Jim Backus, the voice of the cat, add to the characterization? And was the crew laughing hysterically while they made this cartoon or did they just not get it?

What about animation fans? While they search out pre-code cartoons from Fleischer, Iwerks, Harman-Ising and Van Beuren for their outrageousness, pine for the WB censored 11, and dream of John K. cartoons created without censorship, do they realize what's in Plutopia and that it's available in a pristine copy?

Maybe it's because nobody pays attention to Pluto. That's the only answer I can offer for how this cartoon got out in the first place and for how little attention it gets. But I sure wish I knew who dreamed this one up and how they got it into production.

Plutopia Part 1

This cartoon is available on Mickey Mouse in Living Color Volume 2. If you're not familiar with the cartoon and have access to it, watch it. The mosaic doesn't do it justice. Much more on this cartoon in future entries.