How to Play Football

Start with the numbers, because the film does. A&M lead by a score that includes half a point, which is not a thing that happens in football, and Tech win on a play that is not a thing that happens either. The narrator reports both without blinking. That deadpan is the whole method of the picture: everything is presented as a straight account of a college game, and the game itself is deranged.

Released on September 15, 1944, this was the second of Jack Kinney's Goofy sports instructionals that year, after How to Play Golf, and the one the Academy noticed. It is also, by some distance, the most crowded film the Goofy unit had made, and the crowding is deliberate.

The premise of the How-to shorts had been fixed since The Art of Skiing in 1941: a calm narrator explains a sport step by step while Goofy fails to perform it. What Kinney changed with the sports-team films was scale. There is no single Goofy here. Both squads are Goofys, the coaches are Goofys, the fans, the vendors, the sportswriters, the photographers, the doctors, the brass band and the old graduates are Goofys, and the effect is less a character short than a population study.

The narrator, Frank Bull, opens by trying to state the rules. Eleven players a side, get the ball over the opposing goal line. He gets roughly that far before the stadium noise buries him, and from then on the film's real joke is the gap between his composure and what is happening in front of him. He never raises his voice. The picture does that for him.

It is a mockumentary in all but name, made before the word existed, and it depends on a kind of animation discipline that is easy to miss. Every one of those hundred thousand Goofys is a variation on a single design, which means the crowd scenes had to read as a mass without turning into wallpaper. They mostly do. The stadium shots are busy but legible, and the cutting between the wide views and the ground-level chaos is where Kinney's timing shows.

The game has a star, and his name is Swivel Hips Smith of Taxidermy Tech. He takes the opening kickoff back 105 yards for a touchdown, which is five yards longer than the field, and the film moves on without acknowledging the arithmetic. From there the two teams trade the standard disasters, fumbles, blocked kicks, interceptions, and one recurring problem with sideline photographers who keep ending up in the play.

The finish is the film's best piece of construction. With the clock running out and A&M up by that half point, Smith drives for the line. An A&M defender misses him and hits the goalpost upright instead, hard enough to swing the post around on its base, and the post catches Smith and carries him into the end zone. Tech win 13 to 12.5. It is a gag that only works because the short spent six minutes establishing that the physical world of this stadium obeys no rules at all, so that by the time a goalpost behaves like a turnstile the audience simply accepts it.

What holds the sequence together is that the narrator treats it as a legitimate touchdown. There is no wink. The commentary stays in the voice of a man describing a real game, and the animation does everything the commentary refuses to.

Jack Kinney directed 39 Goofy shorts, from Goofy's Glider in 1940 through How to Sleep in 1953, and the sports films were the spine of that run. The Art of Skiing came first. How to Play Baseball followed in September 1942, made on a rushed twelve-week schedule at Samuel Goldwyn's request so it could play alongside The Pride of the Yankees. How to Play Golf and this film both arrived in 1944, and Hockey Homicide, the most violent and most abstract of them, came in 1945.

The narrator explains the sport. The sport declines to cooperate. That was the entire franchise.

The formula was reliable enough that the studio kept it going for a decade, and the reason it did not go stale is visible here. Each film took the same narrator-versus-action structure and pushed one variable. Baseball had the tight schedule and the feature tie-in. Football has the crowd, the team names and the idea that a whole college can be one character. Hockey would take the pace past the point where anything could be followed. Football sits at the balance point: fast enough to be funny, still slow enough to see.

The story is credited to Harry Reeves and Rex Cox, the score to Oliver Wallace, and the animation to George Nicholas, Norman Tate, Marvin Woodward and Andy Engman. Kinney himself and John Sibley supplied crowd voices, which fits the film's general air of a unit having a good time with a full stadium to fill.

How to Play Football was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoons, at the 17th Academy Awards. The other nominees were And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dog, Cat and Canary, Fish Fry, My Boy, Johnny and Swooner Crooner. The winner was MGM's Mouse Trouble, a Tom and Jerry short produced by Fred Quimby, which was the second of what became a long run of Tom and Jerry wins in the category.

It is hard to argue with the result on craft; the MGM unit was at its peak. But the Disney entry was doing something the others were not, which was building a comedy out of scale and narration rather than out of a chase. Of Kinney's sports shorts, it is the right one to have been singled out.

A few production details worth keeping. The surnames scattered through the game were taken from members of the creative team, an in-joke the studio used more than once. The stadium background outlived the film by a long way: it was reused in 2007 for How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, a revival of the how-to format made more than sixty years later, which is as clear a statement of the original's standing inside the studio as any award.

The short reached DVD on December 2, 2002 in the Walt Disney Treasures set The Complete Goofy, and later on the fifth volume of Walt Disney's Classic Cartoon Favorites, under the heading Extreme Sports Fun. The Treasures release is the one to seek out, since it puts the film between Baseball and Golf, where the escalation of the formula is easiest to follow.