Blue Rhythm

Blue Rhythm was released on August 7, 1931, the thirty-first Mickey Mouse short and the seventh of that year. It has no plot to summarize, so the honest way to describe it is as a set list. Mickey sat down at a piano and opened with a classical flourish, the kind of parlor recital that the studio liked to puncture. The flourish slid into ragtime. Minnie walked on and sang the first verse of St. Louis Blues; the two of them took a verse together, then scatted through more. A full band came in behind them. Mickey stepped away from the keyboard to conduct, took a clarinet solo, and the whole ensemble ended the number by jumping onto the bandstand hard enough to bring it down.

That is the entire film. Burt Gillett, who directed most of the 1931 Mickeys, did not bother with a framing device or a reason for the concert to exist. Nobody bought a ticket, nobody heckled, nothing was at stake. In 1929 the studio had used the same idea as a comic premise, with Mickey fighting his own instrument in The Opry House and The Jazz Fool. Two years on, the instrument behaved, and the joke had drained out of the setup. What remained was a straight musical performance drawn by hand, and the interest lies in how the animators filled seven minutes with a single tune.

The band was the barnyard company that had been accumulating since 1928, and Blue Rhythm is one of the better places to take a census of it. Each player got an instrument suited to the body: the long dogs got the long horns, the heavy cow got the heavy strings.

Pluto on trombone is the odd entry. Four months earlier, in The Moose Hunt, he had been introduced as Mickey's dog, a creature that thought with its nose and barely stood on two legs. Here he was a bandsman with a slide. The studio had not yet decided whether Pluto belonged to the old barnyard tradition, where every animal could play in the band, or to the newer, more naturalistic idea of a pet. Blue Rhythm caught him mid-transition, and the inconsistency is more revealing than any single gag in the picture.

The song mattered. W. C. Handy published St. Louis Blues in September 1914, and by 1931 it was one of the few blues numbers that had crossed over into a pop standard, recorded by nearly everyone with a band. Picking it for a cartoon was a commercial decision, not an artistic one: audiences knew the melody, so the animators could cut between players and trust the ear to hold the piece together. The classical opening on the piano is a small joke at the expense of the concert hall, but the real content is a barnyard doing a credible dance-band arrangement of a well-known hit.

Mickey did not play a clarinet solo so much as impersonate a man who played one.

The clarinet passage is a caricature of Ted Lewis, the bandleader whose battered top hat and showy, wailing clarinet were a fixture of the period. Mickey did not play a clarinet solo so much as impersonate a man who played one, and audiences of 1931 would have caught the imitation at once. This is the same instinct that had the studio naming a cartoon after Al Jolson pictures two years earlier: the shorts assumed a viewer who followed popular entertainment closely, and rewarded that viewer with references that now need a footnote. The Lewis bit is the one moment where Mickey stops being a bandleader and becomes a performer with an identifiable comic point of view, and it is the highlight of the film.

The contemporary notices are worth reading because they reviewed the sound, not the drawings. The Film Daily, in October 1931, called it neatly executed and thoroughly entertaining. Variety, catching up in March 1932, singled out the synchronization and the musical program. Neither mentioned Pluto, the band lineup, or any specific gag. To the trade, a Mickey Mouse short in 1931 was a device for keeping music in time with pictures, and Blue Rhythm was judged the way a phonograph record might be.

Seen now, that emphasis explains the film's shape. The cutting follows the arrangement rather than any comic logic. Each instrument gets a close-up when it takes a phrase, the way a film of a real orchestra would be shot, and the animators' job was to make every player look like the source of the sound. Judged on that narrow brief, the short is precise. Judged as comedy, it is a long stretch of competent playing with a punchline at the end, and the collapsing bandstand is not much of a punchline.

Blue Rhythm belongs to a small group of 1931 Mickeys that are pure musicals, and it is the most single-minded of them. There is nothing here that the studio had not done before; what is different is the discipline. One song, played through, with an arrangement that gives every stock character a job. The Ted Lewis impression and the piano's shift from concert hall to rag are the only places where the film has an opinion. Everywhere else it is content to be a very good accompanist.

Later viewers found it through the 1998 Ink and Paint Club episode on Mickey's musical shorts and the 2002 Walt Disney Treasures set of black-and-white Mickeys. Both placed it as a specimen of the studio's music-first period, which is the right context. It is not a film to watch for a story. It is a film to watch to see how, in the summer of 1931, a drawn band could be made to swing.